It’s the ebay of boat parts. Looking for ‘anchor’ on ebay produced; anchor jewellery, mugs with an anchor on, caps with an anchor on too and… anchor patterned underpants. OK there was the odd anchor and anchor chain and anchor cleat amongst them but it took a lot of wading. Again it was the usual story of one-size-to fit-all. Yes it had it’s advantages. Everyone goes to ebay but sometimes a specialist is needed.
So I prototyped boatpal.org using Claris’ FileMaker. Why FileMaker, well it’s a ‘rapid development platform’, which in essence means that it probably was 5-10x quicker to create than say php/MySql. It’s cross platform, can be viewed via a browser on iOS, Mac, Windows and Android.
So what’s the downside I hear you ask.
There is a licence fee from FileMaker, but compare that to the huge savings in development costs.
One can’t scale it up to ebay size. But then it’s a specialist shop and 100s of concurrent users are more than enough. But if it’s not, you already have a working prototype, with all the calcs, queries, script and coding etc to just translate. Easy peasy.
