For everyone that’s been wondering about what we’ve been working on over the last several weeks—wonder no more. We’re building a form buider. And we’re calling it Wufoo.
Specifically, it’s a complete solution for creating and managing online forms. I know. A form builder. It doesn’t sound very sexy, but I can promise you it’s going to be very exciting (and fun). Wufoo is built on some pretty sweet ideas and it’s resulted in a lot of the content that you’ve seen on Particletree.
Obviously, proof is in the pudding and in a few days we’ll be ready to start testing Wufoo with a small set of users, but until then we figured we’d allow people to start playing with an interface demo of the form building section of the application just to get some eyeballs on it. Everything is still in rough sketch mode, so definitely send us feedback as you play with it.
Also, I highly recommend signing up for the mailing list. That’s where we’re sending out the cool as the cool gets built.
Maybe I’m just retarded, but I can’t figure out how to save “Field Instructions” … or is this feature not yet working properly? Firefox 1.5.0.1
I’m using Safari, and its freaking awesome. Well done guys. Useful tool, even with the effects.
And you can quote me.
Nope, doesn’t work for me.
basically I have a dark brown bar along the top, and the text down the right. The Add Another Field button is disabled. The brown bar along the top has a small (I) in, but nothing else (no Wufoo logo as per the screenshot).
when I click the brown bar three arrows appear in the left column (no text).
clicking the right arrow brings up the page title editing box, which seems to work fine.
clicking the middle arrow seems to do nothing.
clicking the left arrow also does nothing until I click into the left column, at which point the selection of fields appear, with the four small green squares on the right.
However, nothing I seem to do will add a field to the form. They do not ‘highlight’ as per the screenshot on the home page.
I have 3 tabs on the left (when I clicked the brown bar along the top) but they are just arrows, no text. I guess the left one is the “Add Field” menu as it brings up some fields. However nothing seems to let me add these fields to my form. I’ve tried clicking around them to see if there was a hidden button or something.
(Firefox 1.5.1 on WinXP)
OK, just realised I have Flash 7 installed. Will get 8 and try again.
Yeah, thats done it. Sorry for the spurious comments, feel free to delete them.
Wow. Cannot wait to put this to the test. Well done guys!
Works really smoothly, but I’m still trying to figure out what the purpose is. I guess we’ll see.
I can’t help but wonder if you guys are going to host these forms or provide a means to integrate them with our sites. But that’d be really bizarre.
I am unable to edit the titles of fields after they get added to the form, using Opera 9 TP 2 & Flash 8.5.
Sweeeeeet… Can’t wait to see the finished product.
Wow! Damn fine job. Can’t wait ‘til it’s finished.
I bet these guys really need a hug right now.
http://www.jotform.com/
It’s not very fast for me right now…
Impressive. Looks very good. As Justin said I’m curious what you are going to do with this application. But if that’s a secret for a while I can understand. You guys obviously want to get me addicted first and then empty my bank account :)
Damn! I didn’t expect competition coming from you guys… I almost had a heart attack when I read the second line of your post. With jotform, you’re the second new competitor in a week…
But I’m not too worried :-) Stimulated yes, because you have some neat stuff going on and you’ll keep me on my toes. So good luck with your project. Looking forward to see the finished product.
Cedric FormAssembly.com
Cool, I look forward to seeing it in action! However, is it just me, or do all Web 2.0 apps shoot for having a “fun” name with two O’s, like the big boys? Yahoo, Google, Wufoo, etc. ;)
Glad to hear some feedback, guys. Thanks for running through it, and we’ll definitely keep you updated on more developments.
Mike, IE support will be coming, and I would imagine Opera soon after. Right now most things partially work on Opera, so if that remains the case it won’t take us too long to support that as well.
Manuzhai, when you say it is not very fast, what are you referencing? How long the page takes to load, or interacting with the interface?
Justin, yes and yes :)
Cedric, I think competition is good for all of us. It will drive us all to make better products. We’ll be sure to keep an eye on you.
looks very promising! from its first looks this is gonna blow away the other formbuilders. great work!
I know what you mean - Noosvine, Rollyoo, Stumbleoopon, Pandoora, Roojoo…
Not to mention Oodeoo.
9rooles?
Ahem.
adriand, I’d say particletree are the ones that need a hug, not JorForm. Why? JotForm actually works. Today. Now. No, it doesn’t have all the fancy animation and fade effects, but um, who cares? It’s a form builder. BBEdit doesn’t have this either, and it works just fine… And thousands love it.
I’m not discounting the other possible interface advantages Wufoo might have over JotForm (or vise versa, actually), I just think all the animations and crap like that are the first signs of bloat in web applications.
Wow, this is great! Will the forms be hosted on the Wufoo site, or will be given a code snippet to drop in our sites?
I’ll definitely be tracking the development of Wufoo.
As a programmer, and thus having no design or layout skills whatsoever, this would enable me to stop looking like a complete hack when I present my works in progress.
Here’s hoping that the app will spawn a zip containing the HTML and CSS.
Nice job.
Form data will be stored on Wufoo, but we’ll provide an API and code generator if you want to integrate the actual form into your site
Wow…buggy. Doesn’t work for any browser I have installed at work — maybe I need an updated version of flash or something. I am not too keen on using Flash for form elements.
Matthew, you probably need to have the newest version of Flash — I had problems before updating as well.
Very impressive. I would like to use it mostly for the great-looking forms it produces. But I would like to be able to adapt the code to work inside my own hosted rails app.
Wow this is great, i really need to be a beta-tester for this software!
Pleaseeeeee.
Sweet stuff! Are you guys going to include some sort of internationalization support? Just noticed the ‘Date’ field is in MM-DD-YYYY format which us folks in Europe dont use (we got DD-MM-YYYY) Also the ‘Money’ field comes with ‘dollars’ and ‘cents’. Or did you -very wisely- decided to steer clear of that particular bee’s nest of problems challenges?
Thanks for the feedback, Mark. We’ll have some different ways of formatting names, dates, currency, etc. Right now, we’re just trying to work out the bugs with what’s there.
Mark,
Actually, we have plans for full international support eventually. Every smart field will be customizable. For example, time can be hour/min/sec, or hour/min, or min/sec. The same goes for date, name, address, money, and so on. Just for the first few rounds of testing, we want to make the core stable before we add that stuff.
Would we as developers be able to integrate the form builder into our applications? i.e. allow our users to create forms that would then store data on our servers? I would LOVE to license this for an application that we are building.
Matt, licensing is an option we have talked about. We’re too early in the life of Wufoo to have details about it, but we’re hoping it becomes a reality.
How did you guys manage to store the templates ? Do you have a seperate table for each template ? Would be interesting to know how the thing ticks.
Great product - good luck
Hi there, it seems a very nice way for developing forms. What technologies do you use?
Keep up the good work.
Daniel - PHP/MySQL/JavaScript. In the actual program there is a smidge of Flash as well, but not in the demo you’re looking at.
Please by all mean, keep in contact with me. We are writing a form builder for our application right now, but it isnt fancy and is posted back to the server to save changes, etc (no Ajax).
So, yes, please keep me on your list :)
I alredy can think of a couple of ways to use this.
Microsoft InfoPath comes to my mind. Maybe exporting entries in XML, to create “admin interfaces” for flash applications? Maybe.
Excellent (and useful) work, guys, I’ll keep track on it!
There’s a recent and detailed review of Wufoo, including a live data-entry forms and several screen captures, plus links to other AJAXified formbuilders at http://oakleafblog.blogspot.com/2006/07/wufoo-challenges-infopath-for-form.html.
Everyone needs a hug.