As a 'newbie' to EPOC programming (and after a break of about 10 years from any sort of programming at all) I thought I should give some fairly serious thought as to what my first Series 5 program should be. It'd be freeware - I wouldn't have the nerve to charge anyone for what would be, after all, my first attempt!  Besides which, I've benefited from numerous freeware programs in the past - it seemed only fair to return something to the Psion community.  However since it was going to be free, I figured that I could be fairly selfish and write whatever I felt would be useful to me. Hopefully in the process it might also be useful to others  though.

I use my Series 5 at work on a daily basis. Some of the information in it is relatively sensitive. Quite often I have to wander away from my desk and on a number of occasions I've come back to my desk to find someone playing with my Psion out of 'techno-curiosity'. I'd started to use the built-in password screen on the machine but it's a pain to use every time and I didn't always remember to set it. On my PC I make use of one of the standard 'sleeping' screensavers that has password protection built into it to 'guard' its contents temporarily and I thought it'd be useful to have something similar on my Psion that looked after the 'security' automatically.

Initially I thought that something similar to Daniel Landes 'Polygon' program with password protection and a time-out feature added would be fine. After thinking about it some more though, I thought that I'd rather have the 'screen candy' doing something more useful than just bouncing lines around the screen...

When I had a Series 3a, I was a great fan of Dan Comiskey's 'Clock' program for the 3a/c that displayed a very nice digital clock over the whole space of the screen. The digits were displayed with grey 'shadows' behind them and the whole thing looked very appealing - especially from a distance. After a while he developed Clock to have a bring-to-front-on-timeout feature - although from memory I don't think there was ever password protection built into it (I may be wrong though). So that was the plan then - to generate an improved S5 version that could be used as a password-protected screensaver...

Since it was going to be freeware, I could quite happily release Beta's, and then version improvements as I went along. As with many of the Psion-related things I do, this would be a learning curve for me as much as anything else. If others liked what I was doing too then great!