InstaCalc - Shared Calculations

Dietrich Kappe, Monday, May 14, 2007 @ 3:14 am

You may have already seen InstaCalc talked about elsewhere, the "sharable online calculator." Lots of the comments on Ajaxian (admitedly a tough crowd) back in March were largely negative. "Why bother?"; "Not slick enough."; "Too simple to be useful," were just some of the abuse heaped on Kalid Azad, the developer behind InstaCalc.

Since then he has polished up this Prototype/Scriptaculous based tool and added canvas-based charts (pie, bar and line). So it is a touch slicker than it was back then, very responsive, though I'm not sure it can ever be slick enough to satisfy all of the Ajaxian Web 2.0 grumps. And I think even before the latest improvements his app provided good value.

When I look at my own use of Excel, probably 95% of that usage is for small, parameterized calculations. I ask questions lik "If I bump up the memory, and reduce the disk space, what will that do to my cost?" and so on. I don't need to full power of Excel for this sort of thing, and given the increased use of Wiki's in development projects and corporate collaboration, the less information I have to stick in a seperate document, the better. This is precisely where a simplified tool like InstaCalc excels.

If I see one shortcoming, I'd have to say that it really doesn't need to be a freestanding application but should instead be integrated as a plugin into Wikis and other collaboration tools. This, folks, is the punchline to my question of whether collaborative spreadsheets were the killer Ajax app. Yes and no. Embedding simple "calculators" like instacalc will remove the need for most spreadsheet use, both offline and online.

 
  Technorati : ajax, applications, canvas, instacalc, prototype, scriptaculous

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Comments: 1 so far

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1. 

   Hi Dietrich, thanks for the writeup! A few responses:

   1) Don’t worry, it takes more than few online curmudgeons to discourage me :). Many people have found it extremely useful, but of course, you can’t please everyone.

   The interface looks simple (by design), but it does quite a bit under the hood: unit conversions (15 feet in cm), currency (10 usd in eur), arbitrary units (10 bugs/day in minutes/bug), unicode variable names and more things that are a real pain in a spreadsheet.

   However, I think I can do a better job explaining the benefits so they are not overlooked, and I appreciate the feedback.

   2) You can embed any calculation as a widget for your blog, wiki or website. See http://instacalc.com/blog/tour for more info.

   Thanks again for the post!

   Comment by Kalid, Monday, May 14, 2007 @ 5:49 pm

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