Toucan Navigate is an easy-to-use desktop mapping software from InfoPatterns that lets you display your information over readily available detailed road maps and satellite images from Virtual Earth. Gabriel Coch from InfoPatterns has come up with a mash-up which takes the data as input from Zoho Creator & generates a neat map in Toucan. From Gabriel's post,
I have been reviewing Zoho Creator (www.zoho.com) recently and decided to create a quick prototype to illustrate how it could be used with our Toucan mapping tool to do something useful.
Here's a simple scenario taken from my college studies in Urban Planning - looking at the relationship between the location of Fast Food Franchises and major highways. My main objective was to accomplish this without a single line of code (no html, no javascript, no nothing) and yet provide enough functionality to answer some basic questions, hence making this potentially useful in the business world.
Specifically, I wanted to:
- Have more than one person enter,update or view Franchise data (i.e. collaborate)
- Dynamically filter the data (by Franchise or by State).
- Display thousands of records on a map.
In less than ten minutes I assembled this.
Gabriel's Toucan mash-up takes the data from this Zoho Creator application.
Paisano has this to say about Zoho Creator (and Zoho DB & Reports),
Zoho Creator offers a free and extremely easy way to create your own web applications in no time at all. You can keep them private for your own use or share them with others. It is similar to Zoho DB & reports in that you can create databases with tables and queries, but Creator goes much further by providing the ability to add customizable forms as a frontend to your databases.
Here’s a sample web app I created in five minutes called My Muse. It can track all of your writing, including blog posts, ideas, publications, etc.
I’ve tried many online services that claim to offer easy database and web application creation but Zoho Creator and their DB & Reports are the best in my book. The load times and application/database performance have always been very good and the intuitive interface for designing is always excellent. I’ve never had to go to the help section with any of their products which says a lot.
Thanks to Gabriel & Paisano. Keep rocking with Zoho Creator :-)
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