Sharing the Addiction

I am at last posting about this awesome little online application creator. You may have heard of Zoho as it has quite a well known set on online office applications which give Google a good run for its money. Well, I was trying to think how to set up electronic registrations for our 2008 cluster expo and I came across Zoho Creator. Basically, you can set up an embeddable form which takes the submitted information and puts it into a database that you can export to Excel at the end. The forms are a breeze to make and the program is completely free! All you really need to do is drag the type of form box (eg a single line box) from the left hand menu into the form you have created.

I wouldn’t have needed to understand anything about scripting except that I wanted the form to perform the slightly complicated task of letting a person know when the workshop option they have selected is oversubscribed so they have to choose again. Zoho Creator lets you do this but I have to admit that I couldn’t figure out how to write the scripts I needed. I put a message up on the Zoho forums and the support was absolutely amazing! Bascially, the lovely man at Zoho ended up writing all the script for me (with a few messages sent back and forwards). I just had to paste it into the right place in my application. I also made up another form that involved no scripting knowledge which allows presenters to submit their workshops.

If you want to see the finished forms, I have embedded them into the wiki I plan to use for the cluster Expo next year. Go check it out. This is a highly recommended tool and I can see myself using this over and over again.

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Xmasy Innes and Suzie, originally uploaded by suzievesper.

Ok, this is not the best picture I have ever worked on but I did do it in two seconds flat thanks to the online photo editor Picnik. They have a large range of Xmas shapes that can be added to you picture which are easily resized and rotated to fit with the image you are working on. They can take images from a variety of online sources such as Flickr or you can upload directly into Picnik. Thanks Innes for being a model with me! Why not have a go? (and I will still be talking about Zoho Creator very soon).

I have just been playing with some Mac freeware (I’ll have to do the same with some PC stuff soon). I am quite excited by iRed. I love Keynote and prefer it over Powerpoint but there are times I need to create something in Powerpoint due to our cluster having Macs and PCs. I know that I can make it in Keynote first and then export it (I do have a Keynote version of the Action Research powerpoint if anyone wants it) but I often have a number of little changes to make in Powerpoint due to some problems with compatibility so it can be faster to just make it in Powerpoint to start with.

Uploaded with Skitch!

Anyway, this is a long winded way of leading up to talk about iRed. One of my frustrations with opening Powerpoint to do my presentations is that the Apple remote that works with Keynote, does not work with Powerpoint. This is where iRed steps in. It lets you use the remote with a range of other software such as iTunes, iPhoto and Powerpoint. You can program the functions of the buttons on the remote and make up your own ‘layers’ for other software as well. Very cool!

Check it out by clicking here.