Crickets Chirping

Behold WikiCalc (check out the screencast*). It’s a cross between a wiki and a spreadsheet, written by Dan Bricklin. He was one of the creators of VisiCalc, which was the first spreadsheet application -before Lotus 123 or Microsoft Excel. I think WikiCalc (or something like it) has HUGE potential.

I don’t know how many times I’ve run across critical applications that written as excel spreadsheets. From humble beginnings, they grow in importance to the company and eventually somebody wants to put it on the intranet. And this is where I usually say, “man, if only somebody had a way to just upload this damn thing to a web server and turn some of the cells into form fields.” I’ve done some unnatural, ugly acts such as calling out to Excel COM objects from HTTP request handlers just beause that was easier than porting the spreadsheet code into C# or java. Often enough, nobody knows exactly what the spreadsheet is doing becuase so many different people have edited it over the years. Plus they want to be able to edit that spreadsheet after the app had been deployed to the web!

Excel has to be the most common Decision Support System in use today. I would be suprised to find out that Sharepoint didn’t support some kind of WikiCalc-like functionality. I’ve played with Google Spreadsheet, which is underwhelming in its current form- just a spreadsheet on a web page. Here’s a CNet article offering some context for WikiCalc amongst Excel, JotSpot and the like: Software pioneer Bricklin tackles wikis.

* Speaking of screencasts I was thinking of starting a Screencast Review site. I (and anyone else) would watch and rate screencasts, and write reviews. Like Siskel and Ebert for screencasts. this is sort of in that direction but it’s just a message board at the moment.

Thinking back on it, I’ve already pointed out a few screencasts on this blog: DabbleDB and SQL on Rails. There are lots of others that I could write about, like Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Movie, and of course the original Rails Movie.

Screencasts are growing in popularity, and like any other video content that demands your attention, having a filter to sort through what’s worth watching and what isn’t would help out a lot.