The Flow Builder, and flows, are temporarily down while we rework the storage mechanism that sits behind them. We’ll let you know here when they are back up. Meanwhile, the collections manager is still there, with some tweaks to its user interface to make it easier to use, and some more bug fixes… (we’re sure there’s plenty more bugs, lets us know if you find one).
GeneralFlows is no longer based around an organisation. Instead, you simply have a database. In fact, you can have more than one database! Eventually, databases can be shared with other people. So in this way, the GeneralFlows database is a bit like an online spreadsheet or word document.
Once we had built the flow store (a generic method of linking your collections together) it became apparent that the powerful bits of GeneralFlows were the collections themselves. The flows needed to be brought closer in, to make them more usable. So we set about refactoring the app, to do exactly this. Now done, it is more of a one-screen application, and so feels a lot like a spreadsheet or database might on your desktop. To this end we’re now calling it a ‘database’, but we’re at pains to point out it is a nice, usable database!
After we had built the two flows (Who and Where) we could see the common patterns. So we threw away the repeated code and instead produced the Flow Store. This lets you define your own flows. Instead of relying on the flows we supply, you can now define anything you want to connect your collections.
Available right away for everyone using GeneralFlows.
It is very simple, but we’ve now got our first flow out there: ‘who’, which tracks who currently has a piece of your stuff. You can assign something to one of your colleagues via the ‘Flows’ popdown menu in the Stuff Manager - and if you need a bigger list of colleagues, go to the ‘You’ menu to add some new ones.
So far in its experimental life, GeneralFlows has tried to do everything at once: the stuff manager, sets, flows… but nothing really worked. It didn’t work on Internet Explorer and we still don’t have a working flow. Which is a shame, because when people hit our front page and try the stuff manager they get excited by what they could do… So recent development is focusing: on trimming out half-done features and making the remaining things work.
