Sprout and blist impress with betas

Last week I highlighted some of the new products and services from DEMO 08 that let regular people do things that previously required professional assistance. This week, I’m highlighting the beta offerings of two additional services that I’ve had a chance to jump into since the end of the show.

Sprout’s Sprout Builder Web service and application lets anyone — even those without a lick of flash programming knowledge — create rich-media widgets (Web-enabled applications) and other flash content. Using templates and a very intuitive drag-and-drop interface, an inexperienced designer can create a widget quickly that can be added to an existing Web site or blog, or distributed to different social-networking sites (including Facebook and MySpace) and gadget-distribution sites (including iGoogle).

In about an hour, I was able to create a flash widget that highlighted the latest episodes of the Network World podcasts, including each show’s description (using an RSS feed template), an embedded audio player, and the show’s logo. I was able to program buttons on the player that would advance to the next “slide” in the widget, which is the next podcast show I want to highlight.

Click to see: Blist aims to make database creation simple.

Because the site is still in beta, there are a few rough edges, and some features are missing that I’d still like to see. For example, it would be great if the audio player template let you put in an audio XML stream instead of a specific MP3 file or URL. Hopefully my feedback to the site will mean improved features as the site continues.

Blist has even more ambitious plans with its service, which aims to turn regular people into database experts. Its online database-building tool is intended to help users create the “world’s easiest database,” using visual and intuitive user interfaces that allow them to manipulate their data more easily. The company’s goal is to make relational-database creation and management as easy as using a spreadsheet.

Click to see: Blist database-building tool

Because blist is a Web tool, it offers features not normally found in database programs (at least not obvious features), including adding embedded photos to a field; telephone numbers with icons to a phone-number field (for cell phone, work phone and so forth); and a “star rating” field that lets people rate their data (great for creating a movie database, for example).
Like Sprout Builder’s beta, the blist beta is missing some features, including the ability to import data from Excel spreadsheets or Access databases — absolutely critical in my opinion.