Windows Phone Thoughts: Keeping Your Identity (and Everything Else) Safe Using Spb Wallet 1.0

Card Modification/Customization
Spb Wallet also allows you to change what information is displayed on the card view on a card-by-card basis. By selecting the View tab of any card, then deselecting 'Inherit view from template', this opens up the Edit View button so that changes can be made to the card.


Figure 18: Editing a card's view. Note that you can add or remove fields, change the images, and select different backgrounds for your cards.

If you want to change one of the standard templates, this is accomplished from either the 'New Template' option from the File menu (for a brand new card type), or the 'Templates' option from the Tools menu (to change one of the existing ones).

Import From Other Products
While other ewallet products provide an import feature, they tend to be somewhat limited. For instance, CodeWallet (from DeveloperOne) only allows imports from older versions of CodeWallet. Flex Wallet 2005 (from WebIS) doesn't provide an import feature at all, and eWallet (from Ilium Software) provides a separate utility on the Ilium website to import card information from CodeWallet and Flex Wallet, but it only works on older versions.

Spb Wallet's import feature provides support for eWallet, FlexWallet, and CodeWallet but sadly, is only available on the desktop version of the software. So, if you are, like me, using your ewallet solely on your PPC, you now need to install the desktop version of Spb Wallet and go though a three step process.

The first step is to 'export' your current ewallet (for this review, I used CodeWallet Pro 6) to a text file using the functionality provided in the existing application (i.e. CodeWallet, in my case). After reading the documentation on the desktop version of Spb Wallet, it stated explicitly that export should be to a text file, so that's how I proceeded. I have heard of some people trying XML but with limited success.

The next step is to copy the file to the desktop, start up Spb Wallet on the desktop, open up either a new wallet or one previously created one, and begin the Import process.


Figure 19: Identifying the source of the import file on the desktop version.


Figure 20: ...and the location of the exported text file from CodeWallet (copied over to the desktop).


Figure 21: The import process then proceeds card by card through your source wallet, asking what template you would like to use for each. Note, there is also an option (in the lower left) for letting Spb Wallet make it's own guesses as to the template, but I'd be rather leery of this.

My CodeWallet file wasn't huge – only about 50 cards or so – so I opted to go through each of them and select what I thought would be the best template for each. It was a bit of work and I'd have to say that it was only 'somewhat' effective. A number of the cards worked properly, but many had the info put into the 'Notes' field, even though the Import routine correctly identified the type of credit card (e.g. Mastercard).


Figure 22: Example of Import. Even though it identified the correct type of card, all the info was placed in the Notes field.

Finally, after all that is done, you'll need to copy the new wallet to your PPC via either the next synchronization cycle in ActiveSync or by copying it manually to the device.