This is not the first product of the kind and won't be the last one. And they look great in theory but get complicated and very confusing and ultimately never find their place. People don't need an integrated tool that does everything. People need a few very good tools that work well with each other. Confluence/Jira is such an example, and to some extent Google's suite and Microsoft's, plus a few more. Unless you can do it better than them in each category -- doc, spreadsheet and project management etc -- people won't choose your product over those. (RIP Google Wave.)
Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)
121–130 of 269 posts
Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)
#122The problem with modern apps is not that they are separate. The problem is that they are walled gardens with deliberately reduced interoperability, using non-open protocols and APIs.
Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)
#123Word, Excel, Google Sheets, Access, etc. All of these are substantial software titles with massive feature sets. How do you propose to offer even a fraction of the capability and at a high caliber of quality when your focus is spread so thin across so many of them? I acknowledge I'm coming across as a naysayer, but I almost didn't click the link because my common sense insisted it must be a toy, and you might need to…
I'd say that most people don't use the massive feature sets, they use the basics. For them, this offering may suffice, given the other upsides it may have, like self-hosting. With time, more features will be added, as revenue grows and the demands become more sophisticated. If you remember, at launch Google Sheets were relatively bare-bones, as were Google Docs.
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Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)
#124I'm not really sure that I see an "app chaos problem". For each company/job workflow that I've encountered, there are a set of apps that solve for the specific use-case. For example as the head of devrel at the last company that I worked for, we used Atlassian products for internal documentation and work tracking, we used Google's docs and sheets for collaborative writing with external teams, and we used github and m…
Exactly, my company have a similar setup and I don't think people have trouble figuring out which tool to use or how they work with each other. Nino seems to try to solve a problem that hardly exist.
Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)
#125This is not the first product of the kind and won't be the last one. And they look great in theory but get complicated and very confusing and ultimately never find their place. People don't need an integrated tool that does everything. People need a few very good tools that work well with each other. Confluence/Jira is such an example, and to some extent Google's suite and Microsoft's, plus a few more. Unless you can…
Indeed. The issue I've repeatedly seen, is that ten different people, have ten different combinations and alternatives of what are "very good tools".
And even then, these people aren't fixed in time. Maybe today I need a killer personal time tracker, tomorrow I might need an advanced scrum board and in two years I need a way to aggregate time tracking of a whole team. And that's just one tiny tool.
Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)
#126Single biggest thing you need to nail down fast: the data model. It is extremely hard to shift as things grow, and without careful thought, it’ll turn into a horrifying miasma of JSONB columns, duplicated data, orphaned rows, and garbage performance. Customers are going to store surprisingly large items in Docs, where you’d be tempted to inline them instead of offloading to S3 et al. Chat practically needs to be its…
He's most likely using SQLite per account, because that's the easiest way to have an offline DB and sync it, which will most likely scale perfectly fine with appropriate indexes as long as you are careful about the feature set.
Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)
#127The most chaotic landing page I've seen in ages. I've seen it on my computer. I can't imagine how it looks on a smaller screen.
Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)
#128There appears to be a demo thingy under the "The modular workspace" header but clicking on things doesn't seem to work.
Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)
#129Initial impression after a few minutes of use: there may be a huge amount of power here, but the app and site seem to be completely lacking guidance and I've no idea what to do or how to learn.
I've installed it on my Mac and am trying to add a set of records representing contacts with a couple of basic fields: name, phone, birthdate. I want to query those records elsewhere in other modules.
The app is giving no guidance on how to do this. On open, it just shows me a blank tab, and I had to try a few different controls to work out how to add a module. I don't know which module I should use to add queryable records, so I'm trying Board.
Now that I've added a board, I can add a first record but there doesn't seem to be a way to add a second. There are columns named "None" and "Unnamed"; the one named "None" has the first contact in it. Pressing the "+" button in the corner adds another column. Eventually, I drag the record from "None" to "Unnamed"; "None" disappears, now there's just "Unnamed", and I can add other records.
I'll keep playing with it a little, but there's only so far that people can be expected to try to work out the usage model that you've designed this for. Sure, there are loads of modules, but how do they link together? An example setup for a fictional team might really help here.
Re: Show HN: I made an app that consolidated 18 apps (doc, sheet, form, site, chat…)
#130This is not the first product of the kind and won't be the last one. And they look great in theory but get complicated and very confusing and ultimately never find their place. People don't need an integrated tool that does everything. People need a few very good tools that work well with each other. Confluence/Jira is such an example, and to some extent Google's suite and Microsoft's, plus a few more. Unless you can…
I tried the "Doc", "Sheet" and "Slide" feature and each of them are incomplete and lacks most of the popular features. It would be better if the author uses existing solutions instead of implement them from ground up.
editor.js [0] for documents and Grist [1] for spreadsheet are some good examples.