Flowmarks Events

Ten years ago I used Excel heavily. The usage pattern was common. What started as a simple spreadsheet quickly evolveld into an information system. Mostly a good information system too: Excel was extremely fast and flexible. The problem with Excel was that a file-based information system worked well only on a local machine with a single user. Once you needed remote access to your data with write privileges, things started to fall apart.

Today, everything worthy of an information system is in the web. Money, time, sports, health.. you name it. Besides remote access and concurrency, webapps offer benefits of specialization that Excel can never do. Money and time management webapps support automated data entry. Sports trackers encourage sharing in social networks. Nutrition and health apps have expert system features like recommendation engines. In specialized applications, out-of-the box reports are usually relevant too. In Excel, you have to define calculations and charts yourself. And then there is the whole smartphone support thing.

But even with all theses improvements, there was something I was missing from the Excel days. Call it versatility and freedom. Compared to Excel, webapps have significant drawbacks:

• setting up the account, credential management for each app
• learning a different UI for each new app, tolerating with what you get
• not having complete control over your data, data loss in the worst case
• limited reporting, you can't define the calculations and reports you want
• bad performance, downtime
• subscription costs, or a free service with no rights to your own data

These drawbacks are acceptable if the payoff is there, but especially with smaller datasets, the benefits may not be worth the costs. Personally, I wanted to track small, ad hoc time series, with pivot table reporting. I didn't really want to use another isolated webapp for this, so I rolled up my own to handle them all.

It is called Flowmarks Events.

You can download it from CodePlex, or just use it at http://events.flowmarks.com.
There is also little documentation and a read-only demo (with book reading data) that has no login requirement.

The events app is a DotNetNuke module. Unfortunately, for licensing reasons, I can't distribute the reporting module that is available in the website.

-mika-