Saturday, December 18, 2010

A Dotty Prezi

I endure a lot of Powerpoint presentations, and my heart goes out to the people who make them, and have to try to make them interesting and eye-catching, but still readable. I mean, how many legitimate things can you do with a title and a stack of bullet points?

So I was delighted to stumble upon Prezi, an alternative method for making engaging presentations. In half an hour I whipped up this not-yet-finished presentation on Dotty, the application I am building:



This is a lot of fun! I'll be making more of these things...

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

going dotty

The problem: we have two storage units full of stuff from my mother's house. She is now in an assisted-living facility, and there is no chance she will need the stuff in the storage units again. There are five of us siblings, and among us we have 11 children, and we don't all live in close proximity to the stored stuff. So how are we going to get the stuff divided out, with a minimum of hassles, so everyone is as happy as the circumstances allow?

I have been working on a solution, called Dotty. It's an online tool that lets each of us log in, review the stuff from storage, and put colored dots (a different dot for each of us) on the things we would like in our households. I have just opened the site for testing with a couple of my sisters, and still have a few bells and whistles to hook up; but overall I am very happy with the app. I built in in FlashBuilder, using Flex 4, with ColdFusion 8 pages to provide access to the MySQL database--and it could hardly have worked better.

I will post a movie soon of Dotty in action. Nice addition to the old portfolio...