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I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

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Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#21
post #2

I've recently been toying with the idea of turning my overly complicated weightlifting Excel into an overly complicated me-only webapp / testflight app. It can't be worse than Excel for iOS!

This is exactly what I've wanted to do for a long time. All the apps in the app store are money sucking or ad ridden and unnecessarily cluttered. I want a simple front end that lets me log lifts to a sheet/database

you could do an ios shortcut that fills a numbers sheet for you

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#22

Let go of your complex solutions. Spreadsheets were the right answer all along.

I organize my life with spreadsheets and it works great. Running Spreadsheet, Health Spreadsheet, Investing Spreadsheet, Gardening Spreadsheet, on and on. :) It's just the best way to examine the data that is your life and have any hope of remembering the past and improve the future.

I’ve kept my finances on a google sheet for well over a decade. And it was old excel before that.

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#24

Glide appears pretty cool, except that the next level up plan over the free one is $69 per month, more than a little steep for most personal users. I myself am wondering if there are any good projects out there that do similar things but that use either local databases or even browser storage?

I think the key value of Google sheets link is that you can do rest of your aggregation/data fixes on Google sheets. And data is in your control

I made an app for a meetup/reunion, but 10 user limit meant everyone had to given a shared password

Like you, I would happily pay for many many services about 10/month - right where streaming subscriptions are. But none of these companies seem to understand that part…

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#25

I wish Google Sheets supported a REST API for their new tables feature so you could interact with them more like a database and less like a 2D array

You could more or less achieve this, by using a Google Apps Script that exposes the sheet. I found spreadapi to be good enough for basic use.

https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#26
I use Notion databases for this. They're essentially spreadsheets with customizable table, list, kanban views, and each row gets its own wiki-style page in addition to the structured data. So it's nice for lists of books or movies or games, where you have some metadata but you also might want to take notes on it when you read/watch/play. It works pretty well for this purpose, but I also could probably make Obsidian or Logseq work and it would have a better privacy story, give me more control over the shape of the data, and not cost $48 a year (though I don't really mind paying).

https://www.notion.com/help/intro-to-databases

I have been looking for a way to switch from Notion since they rolled out AI features without an opt-out (besides emailing them). I don't even dislike LLMs, I just want to know what I'm sending them and when.

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#27

I wish Google Sheets supported a REST API for their new tables feature so you could interact with them more like a database and less like a 2D array

You could more or less achieve this, by using a Google Apps Script that exposes the sheet. I found spreadapi to be good enough for basic use. https://github.com/ziolko/spreadapi

This is great, thanks!

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#28
post #2

I've recently been toying with the idea of turning my overly complicated weightlifting Excel into an overly complicated me-only webapp / testflight app. It can't be worse than Excel for iOS!

This is exactly what I've wanted to do for a long time. All the apps in the app store are money sucking or ad ridden and unnecessarily cluttered. I want a simple front end that lets me log lifts to a sheet/database

get Claude to make an app and publish it as a PBA

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#29
post #9

Why lock down to a nocode tool instead of just hacking together a simple html5 page? Ai assistants have speed up the prototype workflow for doing less code/design.

True that Claude can generate a simple working prototype in a single prompt. But there's still the friction of deploying the app, making it accessible across devices, and easily managing updates. Which something like Glide streamlines for non-technical users.

publish it as a website and download it as a PWA

Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

#30
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

so can a simple HTML5 page with a jquery script tag

I've always heard of completely devoid out of touch developers but this is the first I've seen it so pronounced.

Did you skip web design 101? If it’s simple enough, you can absolutely slap it together with jQuery and html.
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