Jun 142007
 

Rob Novak has uploaded our third Lotus Quickr template. This time you’re introduced to QSurvey.

In my third demo, you’ll be introduced to QSurvey, a component that allows you to create surveys, lets users take them, and provides two methods of generating survey reports. I’m loving this one myself, because having been in the Lotus world for nearly 15 years now, surveys have been in demand and really hard to do. There have been and may still be some third party products for this. I’ve even built it myself, many years ago. There was much pain in the days when it was nearly impossible to assemble fields onto forms without being a trained developer, and have it look good on the web.

The implementation here in Lotus Quickr is fairly elegant, as we store all the survey questions as JSON, all the answers as JSON, and simply reassemble it all for the live reports. What I like about QSurvey is how easy it is to use…I can create a survey quickly with a question “wizard”, enable it, and let people take it for either a defined period of time or disable it myself. And of course, there are options for securing the survey, deciding who can see result reports, and choosing whether to allow anonymous access.

Click the link to check out the QSurvey Demo.

Jun 052007
 

I’ve created some Google maps mashups to help our delegates of Collaboration University get around and become more familiar with the venues.

You can check out Kansas City and London here. If you have Google Earth you can also open these mashups inside there by clicking on the following links: Kansas City and London.

May 302007
 

At Rob Novak’s and my session, BP311 — The Great Code Giveaway — Web 2.0 edition, at Lotusphere 2007 we had this slide at the beginning of our session.

We were having a little fun with the just announced name change of Lotus QuickPlace to Lotus Quickr. So we changed our names to Robr and Viktr. Jonas Israelsson captured the slide with his camera. You can see all his photos from Lotusphere 2007 by clicking here.

Today I was at my registrar to update one of my other domains and I just happened to remember that slide and our “name changes”. I looked Viktr.com up and to my surprise it was available so I bought it right away. It is pointing to eKrantz.com but maybe I should start using it instead. What do you think?

May 142007
 

Today Rob Novak posted his second demo of the upcoming Lotus Quickr Templates that we are busy developing here at SNAPPS. This time it is QPresent. From Rob’s blog:

QPresent’s innovations build upon a core capability in Lotus Quickr, namely the ability to upload a Microsoft PowerPoint slide presentation and view it as slide images in the browser. In Lotus Quickr (and QuickPlace before it), you could do this then page through the slides or zoom the presentation. With QPresent, we’ve plugged in our custom workflow engine, made slide navigation Ajax-enabled to avoid screen refreshes, and — the big feature — plugged in a commenting module that lets other users comment on the presentation slide by slide.

May 072007
 

Rob Novak and I have started a series of demos and tutorials about the upcoming Lotus Quickr templates that we are developing for IBM. Mine are geared to the developer who wants to understand the details of a particular concept, possibly to reuse it or modify it, while Rob’s will be more designed for you to understand what they are and how users will benefit. The “tag team” approach should give you a great education on what is possible with Lotus Quickr. Eventually we’ll have a library of demos and put them all in one list.

The first demo today is for QPhotos. Enjoy and please ask questions below in the comments area.

Apr 192007
 

This weekend I’m going to visit my American cousin outside Jefferson City to hunt some wild turkey, this one, NOT this one. You might not now this, but I’m an avid hunter.

My normal hunting trips during a year are:

  • Wild Turkey in April. Kansas and Missouri.
  • Dove in September. Missouri, sometimes Kansas.
  • Pheasant in October. South Dakota.
  • Deer in November to January. Missouri and Kansas.

On top of these hunting trips I hunt small game and fish whenever I get a chance. That is not often since my family and work takes up most of my time. But this weekend, as I already mentioned, I’m taking some time off from coding Lotus Quickr templates and preparing for Collaboration University, to hunt some wild turkey.

Apr 032007
 

The last 4 years I have attended the Kansas City Royals opening day game. Yesterday was no different. I took some time off from creating Lotus Quickr templates and went to Kauffman stadium at around noon for some pre-game tailgating. It was a beautiful day in Kansas City with over 80 degrees Fahrenheit (26.6 C). REO Speedwagon sang the anthem and a B-2 bomber from Whiteman Air Force Base flew over the stadium. It was a great opening day and the fact that Royals beat Boston Redsox 7-1 made it even better.

Mar 282007
 

On IBM’s website you can now listen to a Podcast interview with Rob Novak, president and founder of SNAPPS. They also have a transcript of the Podcast. In the interview he is announcing new templates that will be available, free of charge, for Lotus Quickr. In the interview the marketing manager for Lotus QuickPlace and Lotus Quickr, Megan Moyer asks Rob what these business focused templates are all about.

Some of the examples are: Contact management, Company announcements, Image libraries and Collaborative presentation management. All in all SNAPPS will create 11 templates.

I’m going to post some more articles about these templates in the next few weeks. Why? How? I’m one of the lead developers on this project for SNAPPS. You want to help? Send lots of coffee to SNAPPS!