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Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

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Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#91

Post by yourad_io »

howsta wrote: post #87
yourad_io wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very impressive, one more congratulation from me. And a couple quick questions: How do you handle conflicts? E.g. If two users change the same scalar value (of an integer cell, let's say) at the same time. Do you accept one and throw a warning back to the unlucky users? How much to you cache locally? I had begun a framework such as this at some point, with the ultimate goal of being usable offline via the localStorag…

Hi, yes--we definitely want to get a dev blog up and start talking about some of this stuff! Re: conflicts, in the case of a scalar value, last in wins, and the system (if you consider the server and each client as nodes in a distributed system) is eventually consistent (i.e. everyone will eventually see the exact same state). In that particular case, we show the other user's profile picture and highlight the cell to…

Nice. There is probably an argument to be made for a notification when you update something and someone else also updates it and your update loses (i.e. small time difference updates or conflicts + your client wasn't last)

Although to be fair, I suppose "undo" covers this. Can you undo an action taken by someone else? (User A commits "aa", User B commits "bb", User A commits "yy"; Can User A, undo to both "bb" and "aa"?)

Edit to add: Looking forward to the dev blog.

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#92

Post by tekacs »

Any 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 (London Tube, many offices, ...).

Totally happy for better offline support to go in a paid plan. :)

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#93

Post by Hytosys »

howsta wrote: post #44
kbd wrote: post #31

The "instantly syncs updates with all users" bit caught my eye. I always wonder how people go about implementing that. Asana works that way, and they have their own framework named Luna that does some functional reactive magic. Meteor, which I've been working with a lot lately and have really enjoyed using, was also created by some ex-Asana people, and enables the same type of real-time synced updates. I was just won…

First off, we're huge fans of both Meteor and Asana. I spoke with Geoff @ Meteor a couple years ago when we were first starting to build out the Airtable product and was very impressed by their approach and vision. We've closely followed the developer blogs of both those projects (and in Meteor's case, their source code). With those learnings, we built our own realtime database engine that supports relational data (w…

>Undo is a particularly challenging feature to implement in a structured relational database context, because it can't be reduced to a set of simplistic character insertion operations as is the case for a google word doc, or a spreadsheet.

I personally hit this roadblock while trying to build a revision management system for a spreadsheet like Google Drive has. I had a pretty fragile implementation that works within a tangled mess of has-many relations. It was a tough time generalizing the whole mess. I'm looking forward to your insights on this particular problem on your future developer blog! Congratulations.

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#94

Post by claar »

This UI would make a fantastic database admin interface.

If this were a JavaScript library that let me use MySQL/PostgreSQL on the back-end, I would be the first to buy a license, even if pricey. I could even live with a reduced feature set, such as no revisions.

Alas, companies can only focus on so many business plans at once. :)

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#95

Post by howsta »

tekacs wrote: post #92

Any 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!

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#96

Post by notastartup »

howsta wrote: post #86
notastartup wrote: post #85

The classical music is a nice touch. It already makes me feel sophisticated and smart. Everyone copies Apple's music causes seizure amongst hipsters. Quick question about the technology used here. How do you sync the data entered from mobile app to the web app? What did you use to create such a beautiful UI?

Thanks! Re: data sync, see this comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374364 Re: UI, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374446

I know its a tall order but any future in open sourcing some parts of the framework?

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#98

Post by [deleted] »

sedachv wrote: post #64
EvanMiller wrote: post #45

This looks like a nice product. Software companies have been struggling to make a mass-market database program ever since Lotus 1-2-3 (the "3" was a database), but the spreadsheet remains king, despite the fact that for storing structured data, it is almost as bad as a Word document with macros. So I'll be rooting for you. One complaint: Referring to your Basic plan as being "Free forever" is a bit disingenuous. In m…

> 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).

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#99

Post by salimmadjd »

Congrats! I got very excited when I first saw the video. Then I signed in to use it, but got stuck.

For me the UI seems a bit heavy. Not sure what it is about the UI, but it feels very constrained for me. It could just be the color, the size of the fields or something. But I think with a small amount of UI tweak it'll feel more welcoming and happy.

I know I'll use it for sure, but now I just don't see a reason to reach out for it over Google Apps. Which is a challenge you'll face.

For example, your demo apps are all great, but for anyone who is hiring or sales leads are a pain, there is already a fully integrated product out there. For the rest, Google Apps might just work fine.

Basically, I think it comes down to fining your product-market fit and going after that segment.

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#100

Post by inthewoods »

Really interesting product - one use case I don't see you attacking is stock or financial data. A typical use case would be as follows: - I want to load up a bunch of stock data - Daily open/close/high/low for a bunch of stocks. - I'd like to have the tool automatically pull this data from Yahoo Finance or Google Finance. - Then I'd run formulas on the data - so a simple example is PercentRank on the 50 day moving average. - Present a summary table with all the other data hidden away.

Right now, I can do this in Google Spreadsheets but it is a lot of work, and I can do this in Excel but it requires manually pulling down the data and then painstaking updating formulas and making sure nothing breaks. I could also do this in R but it's too complex for me.

Thanks for sharing and good luck!

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