Shaggy Dog Stories

Archive for the ‘wishlist’ Category

Look closely, kids. See that old piece of hardware on the desk over there, the one in the dusty charger cradle? People in the ’90s and early 2000s used to carry those everyplace. They were called Palm Pilots. It was a rare meeting where at least one or two of the little suckers didn’t go off to remind their owners of things more important than meetings. You had to buy a special card to get it onto the Internet, and frankly, the mail program was so wonky that it was hardly worth the trouble. No, you couldn’t make phone calls with it. That little pen thing? That’s called a stylus. Not only did you use it to do most things on a Palm Pilot, but you could unscrew it and use the little thingummy in the point to reboot the Palm Pilot when it froze up  tighter than a duck pond in January.

I can never retire this relic, or even offer it to the Computer Museum as a curiosity. As ancient and dusty as this thing is, it still runs the one application I have never been able to replace: DataDog. DataDog is a collection of database applications designed to capture all your dog’s data in one place. Developed by the folks at SuperPuppy.com, DataDog collected and stored info about everything from your dog’s registrations, health certs, and microchip numbers to the date, venue, judge name, rating, club name, location, and points for every dog show — plus agility, obedience, freestyle, and other dogs activities that were around at that time. (Data Dog is too old to include rally, though.) It kept track of OTCH points, CH points, and Super Qs. It stored each dog’s shot records, medical information, and vet appointment times. It wasn’t quite a relational database, but you could share information (for example, AKC registration number) between records belonging to one dog. When Dinah was still showing in the classes, I carefully logged every show, every point, from her debut in the 6-9 Puppy class all the way to the weekend when she finished and moved up to Best of Breed. Every one of Seamus’s scores from his APDT RL1X, and every judge we showed to, is captured in DataDog. Every OFA and CERF record, every microchip — those are in DataDog. I never did get ambitious enough to enter 5-generation pedigrees for everybody — but DataDog holds those, too.

Thus far, I haven’t found a tool for the iPhone or iPad — or even for a regular computer running any OS at all — that does what DataDog used to do. Aside from the Dog Agility iLog app (a comprehensive app for agility competitors), Mushometer for sled dog racing, and a few apps addressing parts of conformation showing, doggy record-keeping in the iPhone is largely limited to shot records and information you’d leave for the dog sitter. Not that those don’t have their uses, but I scrolled through eight pages of dog-related apps and came up with nothing even remotely resembling DataDog.

Someday, I hope to be able to download a comprehensive app that takes care of all the things that DataDog does — and trust me, I’d be happy to pay what it’s worth just to have all that functionality on my iPhone. Until then, the Palm Pilot remains on my desk, along with years of collected knowledge — and collected dust.