The Cherry PC apps are designed to be easy to use and easy to modify. Web developer shops can use and offer our apps to their clients and modify them specifically for their needs.
We released a new beta for our apps today. We created an entirely interface that runs as a "single page" app.
It's much faster, uses a "Dashboard" style layout that makes it easier to get to the tools you want to work with, and it can run multiple apps in the same window. For example, you can have your Contacts app, a list of your most current invoices, proposals, etc, showing, and your "Todo" app accessible on the same screen.
And we released a new "Demo" that has some data pre-loaded so you can see how the reports app works and create invoices and other documents from the Contacts app that has data pre-filled, and we have some items in the "Products/Services" app that let you "fast fill" the item list in documents.
The Cherry PC apps are built to use CouchDB and designed to run online and offline, and by used on as many desktop PCs and mobile devices as you want.
We also provide easy to use tools that you decide where your data is stored, and we offer an incredibly affordable "Mini App Server" that lets you run our apps in-house over your local WiFi and keeps all your data off the internet.
We're taking a new approach to web apps for businesses. Since this is a site for hackers I'll run it down in some detail...
Our apps use "Service Workers", so once you've loaded the app "Home" screen you can use them online or offline.
There won't be any data in the app database so the first thing you should do is take a look at the "Preferences" and enter a business name and other data and set any other preferences you want.
At this point the apps run and store all your data in your web browser and for the most part you won't touch our server again except to check if we've updated any of the application files.
The data services are pretty cool. Once you have those set up you can use the software on all your desktop and mobile devices and they'll all sync up and be ready to work both on and offline. When they come back online they'll sync up in the background and be ready to work with all the latest data.
The apps are built almost entirely with PouchDB/jQuery/Bootstrap. They're delivered with the Apache web server and the data services are handled with CouchDB.
Our goal is to provide our software to the general public and also a wide range of supporting services to web developer shops everywhere so they can modify our apps for their clients.
And we'll provide web shops a market place where they can sell "Add Ons" they've developed to the suite of apps we're providing for free.
One of the main goals of this project is to make it easy for anyone to modify our apps. To do this we've tried to keep bar for entry as low as possible. There are no doubt a lot of "better" ways to make apps like these and we spent a lot of time looking into the "best" way to do it. To be honest, I couldn't really decide what I thought the "best" way was and after struggling with that it dawned me that I had the option to look for the "easiest" way. One might argue there are easier ways than I've chose, and I'd love to hear them because I'm really all about learning.
Cherry PC was selected for the Advisor Track for this year's "Startup School".
The Cherry PC apps are designed to be easy to use and easy to modify. Web developer shops can use and offer our apps to their clients and modify them specifically for their needs.
