InstallExpert installation kit Professional Edition - 4.0

Pilot Catapult was the first installation kit specifically developed for the needs of the Palm® computing platform.

InstallExpert is the successor of Pilot Catapult, introduced with version 4 of the product. The name change reflects both the enhanced product scope, since as of version 4 it can target Palm OS, Windows Mobile and BlackBerry handhelds, as well as the developer/consumer vision for what it does.

Why was Catapult created
Back in 1999 PDAs were still fairly new and BEIKS got quite a few calls from angry customers rightfully claiming a ZIP file would never install on their PDA. We made an installation with out favorite InstallShield® only to find out it was introducing around 400% download size increase! Not only that, but we had to actually dedicate a full-time engineer to manage the many builds! He was complaining it was hard, there were errors in the scripting engine requiring us to upgrade to a Pro version for some $XXX.00 and so on and so on.

We have found the hard way that the generic desktop install kits like InstallShield® and WISE® simply did not cut it for our Palm OS applications deployment. They were fat, inefficient and were costing us in money and time, the second being even more important.