Anyone who has an interest in his or her golf game besides, "Did I hit it straight this time?" will find some use in Golfwits Pro. This useful little program aims to help you document every drive, chip, pitch, and putt so that you can improve your game. We don't think that's too lofty a goal. You can use Golfwits solely on your desktop PC, and you can also sync it up with your Pocket PC (Windows CE) handheld device so you can take Golfwits with you while you're on the course. It also comes with a free Palm Organizer version that you can download from the Golfwits Web site. We chose to do the install for Palm Organizers and sync Golfwits up with our Handspring Visor Deluxe. There are notes about this all over the Golfwits Web site, but just in case you miss them, be sure to do a HotSync with your handheld twice, so that it picks up both the program and the maps.
Which leads us to the maps. They are really the strength of the Golfwits program. From the Golfwits Web site, you can access thousands of course maps all over the country (as well as a few other countries including Canada). A quick search for courses in the Seattle area turned up nearly every course we were familiar with--only one of our favorites was missing. However, the Golfwits folks seem open to suggestions, so if you request a map of your favorite course, they will most likely produce it.
Mastering Golfwits--especially on your handheld--will take some time. We had to sit down with it for a while before we got the hang of how to access statistics and record our ball position and ball path on the course, so we advise that you work with it and the online manual a bit before you hit the fairways. (Not to mention, it took us a while to figure out how to make the maps we downloaded sync up with our Visor--again, read the manual carefully.) But when on the course, once you're done recording ball position and club used, Golfwits calculates everything else for you: remaining distance to the hole, score, and overall game statistics.
You can also input data into Golfwits on your desktop, but this seems like a secondary function. The biggest benefit of the desktop version seems to be checking statistics once you've completed a round on the course, and using that information to improve your game. But if you're using Golfwits without a PDA, you can print out a Pro Book of your selected course from the Golfwits interface, take this scorecard with you, and then come back and input the game manually into Golfwits. Another function that's pretty impressive is the option to e-mail your game to friends--though we only recommend this function if you actually played well.
You'd be pretty hard pressed to find a utility that goes as in depth into your game as Golfwits. In fact, we can't think of any program that does quite what Golfwits does, making it an obvious choice for anyone who cares this deeply about the game of golf. --Ara Jane Olufson
