When it comes to the online office app market, Zoho absolutely kills the competition in terms of its offerings. To me, the product that most outshines the competition is Zoho Creator. I love the forms in Google Docs, but Zoho Creator is far more robust. With Zoho Creator, you can basically very easily create a database driven web app using drag and drop form elements and support for functions and scripting (if the scripting stuff is too complicated, you can just create a standard form that will store data in a spreadsheet/database). With enough time and skill, you can do some pretty amazing things with Zoho Creator.

Thus, it's not that surprising that Zoho has launched a marketplace where users can offer up and download user-created Zoho apps. The Zoho Marketplace, which offers both free and paid apps (though I haven't been able to even find any pay apps), offers users the ability to take advantage of pre-written apps and integrate it into their workflow. Everything is hosted on Zoho, so you don't have to worry about compatibility or viruses.

Users can even request a specific application and get a response from the development community. If you want to sell or offer up your own Zoho apps in the Marketplace, listing is free.

To go along with the new Marketplace, Zoho also rolled out version 3.0 of the Zoho Creator. I've been playing around with Zoho Creator in the last couple of days, because I need to automate a data collection process, and am really impressed and excited by the changes. You can now create custom HTML pages that are actually part of the app itself, and embed forms and widgets and other elements into those pages. You can also now use something called Stateless Forms, which basically means you can use the Zoho Creator tools, but not have the data store in Zoho. So if you have your own database system already set-up, you can just use Zoho to collect and export the information.

I started playing around with Creator after I hit a wall in what Google Docs would let me do. Not only did I solve my orignal problem, I now have all kinds of ideas for future stuff, now that I know what Zoho Creator can do.

Zoho Creator 3 and the Zoho Marketplace are available now. Free business and personal accounts are available for Zoho, and paid monthly subscriptions for more storage space, the ability to create more applications and support more users are also available.

When it comes to choosing a content management system (CMS), the open-source Drupal is often a great choice for large or content-rich sites, because it scales well, supports multiple authors and is thoroughly customizable. The downside of all of this power is that for new users especially, the learning curve can be pretty steep. Although Drupal 6 was a huge step forward in overall usability, from a web admin perspective, it's still not exactly easy.

Acquia, a company founded by Drupal creator and project lead Dries Buytaert, has just launched Acquia Drupal, which packages Drupal and some of the most popular and highly rated community modules together and also offers commercial support. This is a big win for both Drupal and current and future Drupal users.

Acquia Drupal is a free GPL-licensed download. It contains the Drupal 6.x core (currently at 6.4), a bunch of community contributed modules, like Google Analytics, Mollom (Dries's spam-fighting content solution), and rating and image gallery tools. I installed Acquia Drupal on my local test server and also installed the latest Drupal release, 6.4. The install process was already easier with Acquia Drupal, because I didn't have to create a settings.php file in advance before filling in my database details. The additional modules also made for a nicer user interface (see screenshot) and contained an additional site theme.

Online auction site eBay has launched a a new tool that makes it easy to find out how much an item is selling for on eBay even when you're visiting another site. It's called Browser Highlighter, and here's how it works. You download and install the tool, and then when you're searching for items on selected sites, a "compare on eBay" button will appear. Click the button and a window will pop up over the web page you're currently reading with a list of eBay items matching the term you were searching for.

Browser Highlighter doesn't work with every site on the web. But it does work with Google and Yahoo! search pages, Google and Yahoo! shopping pages, Amazon, and Nextag. Say for example, you're searching for an iPod. You can search Amazon for iPods, and see a list of items matching your query on Amazon. Then you can click the compare on eBay button to see if you can find a better deal on ebay before making your purchase from Amazon.

The plugin also comes bundled with the Skype browser extension that lets you click any phone number on a web page in order to initiate a call with Skype. This plugin's been available as a separate download for a while. While you can uninstall the Skype plugin once it's installed, there does not appear to be a way to opt out of installing it in the first place if all you want is the Borwser Highlighter.

Browser Highlighter works with Firefox and Internet Explorer and is available for Windows only. eBay plans to release a Mac version that works with Safari soon.