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Real-time community Peripheral & App Compatibility - now enabled!

Handheld PC News

Posted 3 years ago | Community | Chris Tilley 0 comments

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When both the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) and the Software Compatibility List (SCL) were originally conceived. It was always the intention that community feedback for HCL peripherals and SCL apps would be used to derive the read-out for whether a particular app/device was compatible with any given version of Windows CE.

The functionality for it was not however coded into either the SCL or the HCL at the time of their release; mainly because both took many, many weeks and months to code and getting them out to the community was the priority over them doing everything that I might like them to do.

With the respective releases of both, the hope was that the response from the community would fill the back-end dataset enough to justify spending the time coding the functionality.

Sadly, since 2002 when the first data-originated HCL was released and 2012 with the general availability of the SCL. The response has been distressingly poor in this regard. To date, there have only been 1165 community compatibility reports against the 1133 apps in the SCL and 4263 reports made against the 798 devices in the HCL.

The Forum profile Community Badges were an attempt to encourage the community to click about in both the HCL and SCL and to report compatibility status' - the idea here being that you receive something for your efforts. While it has resulted in a small increase, it didn't quite realise the surge of responses that I had hoped for. As such, the functionality has remained a desire.

For anyone who gives an occasional glance to the site's changelog (does anyone ever look?) over the last couple of weeks. You will notice that the site has received a lot of attention during December. For anyone who has been using the site over this time, you may have also noticed that the HCL saw a significant overhaul a couple of weeks ago with a version bump that made it more compatible with SmartPhones and Tablets. Real-time community OS compatibility was enabled in the HCL with the release of version 4.5 while real-time community OS compatibility in the SCL enabled today with version 1.1.

What this means is that if you notify the HCL/SCL of compatibility with your H/PC's and their respective versions of Windows CE. You will immediately see the compatibility status of a app/device change to reflect it; provided that there isn't already a consensus over it. The more votes for a particular device/OS combination, the stronger the recommendation will be based upon the available data.

In instances where people vote maliciously to SPAM the system (and sadly there are people who actively do this). You can simply counter vote against an error and once a quorum (majority) is reached, you will invalidate the SPAM record - although we can of course just delete SPAM votes if you report them to a mod/admin.

Any existing votes that you may have made in the HCL/SCL are fully qualified in the new community compatibility stats - and my thanks to you for your votes. I encourage everyone to try to remember to up-vote/down-vote apps and peripherals in both the SCL and HCL as they do help others to make compatible finds. Especially when the original developer compatibility information could easily have never been updated after the release of Windows CE 2.0 in 1997.

So please, have a look at both. Report your apps and devices - request them to be added if you can't see them - and if you want to help by adding missing apps and devices do get in touch. I am aware that there are plenty of things that are still missing that should be in both.

... and don't worry. You still get your forum profile badges when you submit compatibility data!

View: Hardware Compatibility List (HCL)
View: Software Compatibility List (SCL)
Posted on 22 December 2021 at 17:02By Chris Tilley (C:Amie)

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