Used to be...
Green screens everywhere. IBM 3270 terminals that pre-filtered data forms and then when the user pressed “Enter”, the data was sent to the mainframe. The applications were written and managed by Information Technology, IT. If you needed a new feature, you called IT. If you needed a bug fix, you submitted a ticket to IT and days, weeks, months later, you got an updated application.
And then...
The Apple ][ came along and VisiCalc allowed users to write their own applications in a language that was simple and corresponded to the way business-people worked. VisiCalc, rows and columns, declarative functions that defined the relationship among cells made perfect sense to real people who flocked to their Apple retailer to buy VisiCalc and an Apple ][.
Later came the Mac and HyperCard as well as PowerBuilder for Windows. These environments allowed normal people to write applications.
Along came the Web
The web came along and empowered users from all over the world to do amazing things. Unfortunately, building interactive web systems was really hard. IT reasserted itself and business applications had to go through IT to be built and deployed. While PHP offers some ability for normal people to build simple web apps, most business applications are written in Java/J2EE or Rails and those apps have to go through IT for creation and maintenance.
Cloud & iPad Vision
The cloud and the iPad are changing the way people approach computing devices and application deployment.
iPads empower the individual by providing a person-centric UI rather than a machine-driven UI. Just watch a toddler play with an iPhone or an iPad... the way that people interact with iPads is intuitive and empowering. The interactive models are rich and amazing.
The cloud allows accessing “stuff” anywhere, anytime. You’re on a train, you can access your world. You’re at home or at work or anywhere else and your world is with you.
But...
The tools for building and deploying iPad apps, especially iPad apps in the Cloud, are old, crufty and hard to use.
Objective-C is the core language for the iPad, but Objective-C is a really hard, nasty language that doesn’t even have memory management. While Interface Builder is a thing of beauty for designing user interfaces, hooking the UI up to running code is tremendously difficult and spreading the computation across the iPad, the cloud and other iPads requires high wizardry.
And, at the end of the day, in order to build an iPad app, one must hire an expensive consultant, wait a long time, and do a lot of work to get an iPad app. This is like the bad-old IT days of yore.
Let's Fix That
Visi.Pro fixes these issue. It’s Cloud Computing for the Rest of Us.
Visi.Pro allows normal people to write powerful iPad applications on the iPad or the Mac and deploy to the Cloud and back to the iPad.
Visi.Pro development, like Excel development, is rapid, interactive and simple. The user simply defines the business logic relationships and wires the sources (inputs) and sinks (outputs) to the outside world. The sources may be a user interface, a database, or events from anywhere on the web. The sinks may be the user interface, the database, or pushing data to some service on the internet.
Empower Business User
Visi.Pro empowers business users to easily create applications like they do in Excel and Access and like they did in HyperCard in the days of yore.
The key goal of Visi.Pro is to enable instant success. Sit down with Visi.Pro and in a few minutes have a running application that seamlessly interacts with data and systems in the cloud.
Environment
The Visi.Pro development environment runs on the iPad and the Mac. Build your apps on the machine you’re comfortable with.
Define your business logic in terms of sources and sinks... where the data comes from and goes to. Visi.Pro computes the dependencies. When a source changes, all the dependent sinks are recalculated and the actions from the sinks (updating the user interface, pushing data to another source in the Visi.Pro system or pushing data out to another system) are automatically updated. Just like when you change a cell in a spreadsheet.
Emporium
Visi.Pro supports an emporium for data, applications, and components.
You can buy external data sources and sinks so that you can get data to and from many services across the Internet.
You can buy applications developed by 3rd parties including Project Management and Team Chat applications.
Visi.Pro’s emporium makes components from third parties available in your application.
Visi.Pro’s emporium offers web developers a great way to monetize their work and to take advantage of the iPad ecosystem.
Status
Visi.Pro is in early development. You can find some open source pieces at http://visi.io
Visi.Pro is in private alpha testing and we expect to be in beta testing in 2012.