Feeling a bit manic in my quest for decent website apps of late.
I have been looking for a good web form generator. I REALLY don’t want to have to pay someone hosting fees for a form when I am already paying a different somebody to host the site. I took a look at the Quask. In fact I came very close to buying the Quask FormArtist Standard Edition for $199, just based on their website. But first, I chose to download the Quask FormArtist (Free Version) as a trial.
Once I had a chance to use the application itself, I quickly decided not to buy it. I was expecting a WYSIWYG situation where I could easily move text and fields around to generate a good looking form. What I found was an application where I had to sit tapping a foot for a couple of minutes while I waited for the program to finish dragging a single field a half inch across the screen. Maybe there is a way to speed this up, but it wasn’t immediately visible to me.
Maybe it’s just because I tried the “free version”, but this slowness was not really a result that I was expecting from a modern app running by itself on a P4 machine with 2 GB of memory. Now, these folks must be doing something right because they have a Page Rank of 7. But, I didn’t have a good experience with this software, so I chose to walk away.
So I continued my quest and found a good web form app called CoffeeCup Flash Form Builder 5.5. They have a 14-day trial and after that, the application is only $34. This is a great find.
Compared to the web forms hosting sites that I could pay for monthly, there will be some limitation with using this. The web forms hosting folks also store the results and offer some marketing options. As I don’t really have a need for that, the CoffeeCup app will probably work well for me.
I took a stroll through the CoffeeCup site and found that they have a bunch of different web apps. There is a Flash Menus App, an RSS Feed Builder, and a local site search app amongst a total of 24 different programs that they offer. They offer a package that includes all 24 of their web apps for only $189.
And yes, I realize that you can do many of these things on-line for free, but there is a certain convenience to having the software installed locally (and I don’t need to have 20 tabs open in Firefox. ) It’s starting to look like I am going to be getting out my wallet and heading back to CoffeeCup.com
