Awesome homepage and video! Bloody well done. All the best. It looks quite useful and easy to use. Have good export functionalities and handle different OSes and you have a winner!
Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid
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Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid
#112Great execution! I wonder if this is what Paul Graham was envisioning when he wrote about a "web-based excel/database hybrid" in his post "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund"[1] in 2008. > 22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid. People often use Excel as a lightweight database. I suspect there's an opportunity to create the program such users wish existed, and that there are new things you could do if it were web-based.…
I wonder what language that makes it easy to keep data in linked lists he might have had in mind.
Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid
#113Native mobile SDKs would be fantastic. We often have to develop mobile apps for clients where there is a need for a relational db in the cloud that the client can maintain with data. The app has to access that data to displayed, as well as add new data.
Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid
#114Awesome homepage and video! Bloody well done. All the best. It looks quite useful and easy to use. Have good export functionalities and handle different OSes and you have a winner!
Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Referring to your Basic plan as being "Free forever" is a bit disingenuous How so? I haven't had a company ever tell me this then start charging. Oftentimes they go out of business, but that is a different problem. :)
Let's see. There was Apple's iTools, .mac, MobileMe, and now iCloud service (sort of one big evolving service, with some bits chopped off or replaced at various points in time), which has gone from free to paid to freemium. There's Google Apps for your Domain, which killed off its free service in favor of the $5/user per month service. Ning shut down their free service and switched to a paid only model. DynDNS also s…
I can't speak to the rest, but I still have free Google Apps for my personal domain. They're no longer offering it for new customers, but those who signed up when it was free still have it.
Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid
#116Great product. Nice to see Howie start another startup (Remember Etacts?)
Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Software companies have been struggling to sell a mass-market database program ever since Lotus 1-2-3 [that is not Access] There, I fixed it for you. (disclosure: I worked on a similar tool, had a friend, one of the best programmers I know, who built a similar tool, worked on an ERP system that addressed many of the same use cases, and I started Skysheet, YC W09, with gruseom).
MS office has been non-optional for the workplace computer for decades, so any tool has to compete with "free-as-in-had-to-buy-it-anyways".
Access is great as a personal, single-user database, but how much software has been written to expand it past that limitation in small businesses? Also, Access isn't available for Mac. And Access doesn't run on your iPhone/iPad. I don't entirely disagree with your comment, but I do think there's room and demand in the market for something like AirTable.
I've personally been dabbling with similar idea for years. Guess I should have invested my time and money in getting it to market.
Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid
#118Any chance you could get the mobile app not lose its cache when 'closed' (or rather 'crashed'/'restarted')? At the moment, offline support works fine unless the app closes or crashes, at which point it loses all of its data until next connect. I'd love to use this app frequently and for data I need constant access to, but have a nightmare scenario of it losing its cache just as I walk into a room without internet (Lo…
It's on our short term roadmap along with a lot of other major improvements planned for the mobile app. Totally agree the experience would be greatly improved if it handled reopening the app better!
You guys should check out www.realm.io, it will be a great way to handle this type of stuff quickly. I am an iOS engineer there
Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're interested in talking about the challenges of creating a performant spreadsheet, I've built a javascript-based spreadsheet backed by a database that's more performant than Google Docs/any open source table available on the internet. I'd be happy to share the techniques. Edit: reach me at shri (at) freshvc (dot) com
How about posting the source :P
+1 would love to see the source ;)
Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid
#120I don't suppose they've considered making IEEE 754-2008 decimal floating point numbers the default number representation. It's a shame Intel didn't consult Dr. William Kahan earlier in their design of the x87 floating point unit. At this point, binary floating point is deeply entrenched despite most uses outside of scientific modeling being better suited to decimal floating point. Most spreadsheet calculations are be…
There's also DEC64, Douglas Crockford's proposal for a decimal floating point type to serve as the only numeric type in future programming languages: http://dec64.org/