Today, I’ve discovered yet another great Flex app that completes my online Flex Office basic suite. It’s called BList and once again, the ease of use of Flex has made ot possible for its creators to be really creative about the way to create spreadsheets. And what I really love is that you are not lost with their new way, since you’re litterally taken by the hand and everything is explained.
So now we have:
- Buzzword for the word processor
- BList for spreadsheets
- Sliderocket for presentations
- Lovely Charts for charts and diagrams
- [+] Scrybe for calendar, todo-lists and notes
What else do we need for it to be really complete:
- A mail application, like GMail or LaszloMail (that is now GoWebtop) but with a more creative approach of course
- A good calendar app, something with simple tools to synchronize meetings ala Doodle for example, possibly synchronized with the mail system for invitation
- And obviously there is a lot of creativity needed in the personal database area
Now imagine if Adobe bought all of the existing startups mentioned above (they have already bought Buzzword) and created the missing tools to build up a great Flex online Office suite, possibly with AIR spin-offs for each application…
What do you think? Do you know of any other Flex app out there that could be integrated in this online Office suite? Would you be interested in such an integrated toolset? Would you or your company be ready to pay a subscription for it?
[edit]
Mike Potter just pointed me to another incredible example of creativity allowed by simple technology. It’s a personal organization tool with a calendar, todo-lists and notepads like I’ve never seen before. I’ve added it to the list above. It misses some meeting synchronization features but it’s really excellent.
[/edit]
3 Comments
Sébastien · February 7, 2008 at 9:28 am
I just received an email with a feedback for this post, and I thought it could be interesting to post it here:
<quote>
I am working on an IMAP client (refer to website link, still need to put in
another 100-200+ hours to get anywhere significant). Will I ever complete it?
maybe… if not, the license is deliberately loose enough for someone else to
pick it up.
I don\’t know how an email client can be more \’creative\’ (according to
your post)… but I am curious to know what that means.
Clayton
</quote>
Well that’s what I mean by creativity. First, we don’t know how we could be creative, then we come up with a feature or a way to do things that we wonder why we didn’t think of it sooner.
GMail was creative by choosing the thread view as the default one, and with its organization by tags rather than folders. Now I really think that their contact management sucks, as well as filter creation.
Another thing, have you ever noticed how it can be easy to forget to attach the file you wanted to send, or forget some recipients. Sometimes you even send an email without a subject because you’re too lazy to think of one. Why so? Well, I think that when we want to send a mail, we’re interested in the content of the message first. And yet recipients, subject and attachment come first and force us to put aside what we had in mind. So we write the message content, and then we come back to other fields and forget half of it. All of that because the order display of fields is the same as the order of fields in the protocol. Well, a good way to be creative would be to put the message body first and reverse all the fields. Because it’s far easier to come up with a subject once you have written the mail, and you see the attachment field right before the “Send” button.
Last idea about creative mail: how about integrating the webmail with IM protocols, for people who want to chat and only have access to a webmail. Something with a quick send button.
And I’m certain there are plenty of other creative ideas out there. So shoot…
Mike Potter · February 7, 2008 at 4:09 pm
http://iscrybe.com/main/index.php is the calendar part you were looking for. :)
Mike
Sébastien · February 7, 2008 at 4:27 pm
Oh my! I just added to the list.That’s just great!