What is it: Bingo Card Creator is desktop software (written in Java swing) I wrote three years ago that, well, makes bingo cards. It is mostly used by very non-technical teachers and parents -- something on the order of 1,800 paying customers and about 100k free trials floating around out there.
What is new: While this app was a very good choice for desktopification 3 years ago, these days I thought I have both the skills and the OSS libraries to actually make a fair go of webifying it. So I thought I'd try making a version in Rails.
Feature-wise the desktop version is still superior but I think the ease of use of the web app is fairly compelling. (Your comments are appreciated.) As of the next release of the desktop version it will feature integration with the web app (allowing people to, e.g., save their cards on my server so they can move them between computers, etc). That feature is not demoable today.
Things that I rather like about the web version:
1) Live preview on card editing. (Prototype + Prawn + ImageMagick if you were wondering.)
2) Guest logins, with an "upsell" while you're waiting for cards to print. (Not a feature I would have included normally, but HN has convinced me of the utility.)
3) Copious backend analytics.
4) Time from front page to bingo cards coming out of printer: less than 30 seconds.
N.B. This is not the production system, since I want to do some tighter integration with the rest of my site and a bit of load testing prior to launch. Anything you do will eventually be wiped.
What is it: Bingo Card Creator is desktop software (written in Java swing) I wrote three years ago that, well, makes bingo cards. It is mostly used by very non-technical teachers and parents -- something on the order of 1,800 paying customers and about 100k free trials floating around out there.
What is new: While this app was a very good choice for desktopification 3 years ago, these days I thought I have both the skills and the OSS libraries to actually make a fair go of webifying it. So I thought I'd try making a version in Rails.
Feature-wise the desktop version is still superior but I think the ease of use of the web app is fairly compelling. (Your comments are appreciated.) As of the next release of the desktop version it will feature integration with the web app (allowing people to, e.g., save their cards on my server so they can move them between computers, etc). That feature is not demoable today.
Things that I rather like about the web version:
1) Live preview on card editing. (Prototype + Prawn + ImageMagick if you were wondering.)
2) Guest logins, with an "upsell" while you're waiting for cards to print. (Not a feature I would have included normally, but HN has convinced me of the utility.)
3) Copious backend analytics.
4) Time from front page to bingo cards coming out of printer: less than 30 seconds.
N.B. This is not the production system, since I want to do some tighter integration with the rest of my site and a bit of load testing prior to launch. Anything you do will eventually be wiped.