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.

The Enterprise Edition contains five language modules: English, French, Spanish, German and Italian.

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.

How is it better
For a starter, it addresses all above issues:

1. It helps users install applications more easily
2. It greatly helps decrease support calls
3. Its minimal footprint makes it efficient for mobile applications distribution; it does not use MFC or the Palm Install AIDE DLLs
4. It is less powerful than a generic desktop installer, thus being easier to learn and use
5. Despite of the above, it is actually better focused on mobile application deployments