Introducing Envy Apps & Schema Surfer
As you may have noticed the amount of content on this blog over the past few months has been a little lacking. Fear not! I am alive and all is well. In fact, I’ve got some exciting news. One of the reasons for not much happening here recently is that I’ve been focusing a decent amount of time spinning up a little company. And with that I’d like to introduce you to Envy Apps.
Right now Envy Apps is focused on building apps on and for the salesforce.com / force.com platform. The idea is to build apps that you can’t live without, that you are envious of if you don’t have them. Man… I should have gone in to marketing 
.
The first product released is Schema Surfer and it’s totally free, but payment in Belgium beers is totally accepted. It’s a great admin/dev tool that allows you to browse and view object metadata from directly within a 100% native app. No longer is there a need to open the Force.com IDE or some other 3rd party tool to view metadata information. Schema Surfer comes directly from my nearly 6 years of experience on the salesforce.com and force.com platforms. There have been many times, especially when I am wearing my developer hat, when I need to quickly view metadata information. Is CollaborationGroup queryable? How is ProcessInstance related to ProcessInstanceStep? What object starts with the prefix 019? If you find yourself asking these types of questions this is the app for you. I built this app so maybe I am a little (a lot) biased but this is one of those apps that you may not think you need but then once you try it you can’t imagine being without it. I encourage you to take it for a spin, the test drive on the AppExchange listing is a great way to do this. If you like the app and you can’t contain your excitement feel free to leave a super friendly and helpful review. If you happen to have missed all of the links above you can get Schema Surfer from the AppExchange by clicking on the big image below:
You may have also notice that in the logo the [apps] is in bracket, like an array (I’m so crafty), which would seem to indicated there will be more than one app. There will, so stay tuned!
Nice app
Very cool – how’d you architect it? Was the limit on describe calls a challenge?
Hi Jason!
UI looks very-2 cool. And i will suggest you to enhance this application so that user can also query on objects. For this I have also created an small app but its for my personal use (video @ http://screencast.com/t/dtwS47zn ) only. You can try it goo.gl/duj9q if required suggestion, tell me.
@Sachin
Query functionality is something I definitely plan to add but I decided to release the current version rather than delay. It should be added in the next major release. Hopefully before the end of the year.
What functionality does it provide over tools like SalesForce Workbench?
@Austin Rivas
Workbench is great and actually has more features and functionality. Schema Surfer is native so you don’t have to leave salesforce.com. It provides a faster more streamlined UI for finding what you are looking for. One of the main reasons I created this app was I despise data trees to drill down on metadata information which is what a lot of apps similar to Schema Surfer use.
Actually, clicking on the big blue image just takes you to an even bigger image
Look forward to trying it out.
Interesting, User interface is really native, cool and so damn fast.
Hats off Jason!!
What really interests me is the name of the app. How did you come up with the name?
Jason, congrats on the new company!
P.S. Love your mom’s comment
@Jeremy Kraybill
Doh! Thanks Jeremy, link is fixed now.
@Rahul Sharma
Thanks! Glad you like it.
@mom
Mom, I’m actually not sure how I came up with the name of Schema Surfer, surfer is quick and fast and so is this app I suppose.
@Manu
Thanks, ya. I think I’m going to make a dedicated post, “The Mom of a Force.com Dev”.
Awesome! Thanks Jason – we sure missed your posts.
What do you think of searching for Field Label/FieldName without selecting an sObject? I was trying to figure out how to do that a couple of weeks ago. We have fields named *Product*Field__c over a bunch of sObjects and each one needs to be updated. Trying to find them in the IDE is a PAIN!
A second idea for your future iterations – a link to “Go to field” or “Go to Object” to jump straight to the setup page for that item.
Awesome app! I am designing something similar. We have a need to perform an impact analysis on metadata when hardcoded value needs to change. A great deal of code was written previous to embracing custom settings, so there is an upgrade effort needed (yes yes, in support of best practices). In the mean time, supporting the changes that teams want to make to enhance their process involves a need to seek out references. Finding all of the code referencing a particular hard coded value is a tedious task. It would be sweet to key in a value like “Team A” and find all the references to that value in the Apex Classes, Triggers, Pages, and so forth…
@Lorie Miller
Hi Lorie. Did you try to download the entire setup to Eclipse (select all checkboxes when selecting your metadata) and use ctrl-H in Eclipse to search throught the whole set? That’s what I usually do.