Zoho Creator goes Live
Tuesday, March 7th 2006 | Ismael Ghalimi
The good folks at AdventNet did it once again: Zoho Creator is now live and kicking. If you’re looking for a free Office 2.0 alternative to Microsoft Access, do not go any further. Truth be told, it’s a little bit rough around the edges — some display bugs, no ability to get public forms to populate private data sets, but there is no other free alternative that I know of today. Zoho Creator goes beyond what online form editors such as jotForm or Wufoo can offer, in the sense that it is based on a true relational data model, allowing users to create multiple forms and establish relations between them, much like what you can do with Salesforce.com custom objects. That being said, the user interface is not as sleek as Wufoo’s, and could turn out to be too complex to use for the less sophisticated users among us. Nevertheless, I remain confident that the people behind Zoho Creator will find ways to make it simpler, and I will wait for them to release a new version that will be integrated with Zoho Sheet, allowing one to populate objects developed with Zoho Creator from a spreadsheet served by Zoho Sheet. This is the kind of thing that Office 2.0 ought to do, and precisely what makes the concept so attractive to me.
Entry filed under: Office 2.0
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Thanks you Ismael for reviewing us. We do agree that we have to make the Form Creation part simpler. We also have plans to support Drag and Drop. We are working on creating web applications by importing Excel Sheets, Zoho Sheets, and .csv files. It should be out soon.
Hello Ismael,
I believe Ning, brainchild of Marc Andressen, might also fall into this category.
David,
You’re right, but I must admit that I’m quite confused by the UI.
I must admit the same! I mentioned Ning because I seemed to recall someone writing about liking to see two options in a category ;-) I am going to try Zoho Creator. I’ve done some Googling for online databases, and with the exception of Intuit’s Quickbase, the options seem to be sparse. The only other I can recall seeing is WebOffice, which claims to provide the ability to create databases with their hosted service, but I’m not sure in their case what “database” actually means.
David,
You might also want to take a look at Dabble DB. Review coming soon…
I have been waiting for a product like this to come out. So far I’ve created an application to manage my prescriptions and an application to replace a spreadsheet I was using to track suppliers, contacts, quotes, events, etc, for a start up business. This second application took me about one night to put together, compared to the two months I have invested in teaching myself MS Access. So far I just love what they’ve got. However, I am looking forward to what they have in store for us down the road!
Thanks Ted, for your appreciation. The application you created is simply fantastic. We will give our best to satisfy your requirements.
Zoho Creator - progress and moving forward…
Seriously though, Zoho Creator, I have to admit that this is the first time I’ve blogged about a service, used the service, had a problem with a service to have those who make the service respond so quickly to me!
Zoho Creator - Feature Requests and Roadmap…
So it took awhile but in the end not only have Zoho Creator decided to use a more detailed Roadmap they have decided to actually use mine. Where do I add my Google Ads in there?
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