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A web-based Excel/database hybrid

ragic.com

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Re: A web-based Excel/database hybrid

#22

Post by longneckdeer »

mooli7dm wrote: post #17

Great idea. The logo is not showing up for me, or for that matter, neither are any of the images on your Features or Pricing pages. On your home page, what is your primary call to action? Do you want people to watch the video? Could you have people try something out? How about making the applications clickable to show more details or have people play with the applications? Have your video proofread for grammar. Good…

We used Google Application Engine as our CDN...turning on billing now!

Re: A web-based Excel/database hybrid

#24

Post by viraptor »

longneckdeer wrote: post #13
viraptor wrote: post #9

Nice. I accept everything that decreases the chances I'll have to work with http://quickbase.intuit.com/ again in the future.

Kind of curious what kind of trouble that you ran into when using Quickbase. You can e-mail me if you don't feel like posting it here. (jeff@ragic.com)

I'm not good at describing the UX parts, but every time I deal with it seems painful. I can't easily get to what I need, update notifications don't work the way I expect (you need to manually mark stuff as viewed), creating custom tables can be blocked by project owners (I understand not editing the shared ones, but if I want to create my own report, I don't see a reason to disable that). I can't point out many big issues, it's just papercuts whichever direction I turn to.

Things that I can point out as missing:

- no support for other locales (it's dd/mm/yyyy and 2300, not 11pm where I live, US is not the only place in the world)

- no rich-text on long-content fields

- no actual changes visible in revisions, history contains only "changed by xxx on yyy"

From the developer's perspective, the API is really silly. It seems to be completely different from normal access path. Tokens need to be authorized by project owners, not all authentication schemes work with APIs. I don't get at all why is API access treated as something additional, rather than a normal usage pattern. If I've got a user account, I should be able to do via the API every action I'm allowed to do via web - without anyone's blessing.

API design also leaves a lot room for improvements. Custom XML only with things like this definition of a query:

    {'5'.CT.'Ragnar Lodbrok'}
    num-4.sortorder-A.skp-10.onlynew
Keep in mind that '-s only separate the arguments to the operators, not the actual items, so for multiple values you have to quote with " inside of a '. Now try to protect that against injections. As a developer I want to cry at that point. Also the HAS operator is special cased to work only on lists of users via their screen name, id, or email... Did I mention that separators for lists of elements are periods (unless explicitly defined as semi-colons in some places).

Trying to figure out the exact meaning of "field_type", "base_type", "role" and "mode" in the results (all are attributes on every value of the results) along with how to resolve them when they reference values in other tables (which can be done in 3 different slightly underdocumented ways from what I've seen so far) is pretty difficult. This may be a good start for a TDWTF article...

Re: A web-based Excel/database hybrid

#26

Post by longneckdeer »

andybak wrote: post #25

Anyone else stop reading after seeing the lowest tier was $19.95/month? Maybe I'm just a cheapskate...

Pricing has always been a big topic of discussion inside our team. Would really like to know what kind of pricing would keep you or anyone else reading this comment interested.

Re: A web-based Excel/database hybrid

#27

Post by bergerj »

andybak wrote: post #25

Anyone else stop reading after seeing the lowest tier was $19.95/month? Maybe I'm just a cheapskate...

I didn't stop reading, but it feels like too high (for lowest tier).

I think there should at least be a FREE tier which allows 1 or 2 forms. Once someone sees the value, they'll jump for more.

I understand that textual data is light, but 250MB seems quite low given current costs of hard drive storage.

Why the user limit too? Your costs seem to be in data transfer/storage.

Re: A web-based Excel/database hybrid

#29

Post by viraptor »

andybak wrote: post #25

Anyone else stop reading after seeing the lowest tier was $19.95/month? Maybe I'm just a cheapskate...

Compare to http://quickbase.intuit.com/online-database/plans-and-pricin... : starting at only $299/month for up to 10 people, for up to 25k records (converted into size actually, so upload one big field to kill 10% of that quota).

I guess it depends on which kind of business are they after.

Re: A web-based Excel/database hybrid

#30

Post by EastCoastLA »

smiler wrote: post #21
EastCoastLA wrote: post #19

Please don't end up like DabbleDB.

This is the biggest concern - invest a ton of effort into something and then the company gets bought out and the product dies. The least Dabble could have done was release DabbleDB as open source.

  It would be nice for them to have written in the contract to open source their product if they go out of business and are not purchased are liquidated by another company.  
  I too spent a lot of time utilizing DabbleDB unique tool-set and have yet to get back to the level of productivity after they went under.
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