Google sheet on mobile is pain. Good idea on how this becomes usable. Will try it.
I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
61–70 of 238 posts
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#62I'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!
I've been very impressed with hevy[0] so far
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#63I tried going all on on Google Sheets earlier this year. I used the Python API and like almost nothing worked consistently. I got 1 sheet to work well with like 1k rows and thought woohoo this is great! So I went all-in, put 25k rows in and Google pooped the bed. It gave errors all the time, rows and columns were funky. API issues galore. SQLite however handled 25k rows without any errors, always rock solid. I gave u…
Thank you for discussing this openly, it can be a real bummer to write something, test it, have something work up to a point then fail due to situations outside your control. You probably just saved me about 20 hours of coding.
to be fair, 25k rows seems like a few more rows than I'd use a spreadsheet for
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#64I 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 o…
You should check out Fibery. It’s ultimately like Notion but a lot more performant and less “finicky” due to being too clever about UX, in my opinion.
Definitely interesting. I think if I was going to put in the effort of switching, it would probably be to more of a labor of love pain in the ass situation like Obsidian where I can be more in control.
My use case would easily fit into the Fibery free plan. Amusingly, their own comparison page argues that Notion is a better fit for me:
“Where Fibery works better?
Processes and work management for medium and large teams. Complex processes like product management, feedback management, user research, software development tracking.
Where Notion works better?
Personal life organizer. Small/medium company wiki. Work management for teams with simple processes.”
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#65Glide is cool ... I wish there were FOSS versions of Glide to spin up nice, neat and simple mobile apps.
There are now quite a few reliable FOSS version of no-code tools (but the mobile space seems to be missing alternatives). Few nice no-code FOSS that I love using are listed at https://blog.n0c0de.com/articles/1635ef6f-f616-8023-b336-ff3...
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you for discussing this openly, it can be a real bummer to write something, test it, have something work up to a point then fail due to situations outside your control. You probably just saved me about 20 hours of coding.
to be fair, 25k rows seems like a few more rows than I'd use a spreadsheet for
Did the commenter say that it was being edited concurrently? Because that's the only circumstance in which it would really be acceptable for it to break like that.
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Even just "make it a PWA" can take an experienced frontend developer a day or more. The manifest needs to be just right, the server might need to be reconfigured to serve the right MIME type, you need to generate a few mandatory icon sizes, you need a service worker even if you're not using it...
If you're using a big framework like Vite, this is somewhat easier, but then it's not a "simple html file" anymore and you spend just as much time fiddling with framework stuff.
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#68I tried going all on on Google Sheets earlier this year. I used the Python API and like almost nothing worked consistently. I got 1 sheet to work well with like 1k rows and thought woohoo this is great! So I went all-in, put 25k rows in and Google pooped the bed. It gave errors all the time, rows and columns were funky. API issues galore. SQLite however handled 25k rows without any errors, always rock solid. I gave u…
The projects I worked on always had a mechanism to dump data into a proper database. For example, I built a daily scraper to collect some of the inventory. I didn’t keep all the data in a single sheet. Instead, all the data was stored in a cloud-based managed SQLite or PostgreSQL database, or sometimes a local SQLite database. Only the day's data was stored in Google Sheets because the client wanted to see the spread…
It feels a little misleading to say you're using Google Sheets as the backend database, when you need an actual database in conjunction with it.
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#69Why 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.
Why buy a bike when you can assemble one from parts?
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#70Love this, big fan of Glide. We've used Google Sheets for a long time to power Levels.fyi and allowed us to move fast without too much of a formal backend. Check out our post here: https://www.levels.fyi/blog/scaling-to-millions-with-google-...