Is that an ad? It definitely sounds like one.
I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
91–100 of 238 posts
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#92I 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…
Starting with a Google Sheet is perfectly fine, but for building a non tabular user interface, or having a few thousand records, I would directly switch to something like SQLPage with a SQLite database.
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
I badly, badly wish Obsidian had some kind of database/spreadsheet feature. I'm limping along with LibreOffice spreadsheets for privacy, but it's a pain having my notes in two different formats. And I miss grep.
What would you use this feature for?
Basically what parent said, little personal database tables. Example: I have a list of 100 movies I want to see, and I have columns like date watched, year released, should I rewatch again in 10 years, notes, etc. I want to be able to do two things:
1. Sort/filter by columns (ex: status = not watched)
2. Add markdown like "[[Steve]] told me to watch this" and have backlinks etc. work seamlessly with the rest of my notes.
I know you can do that with Obsidian "properties" but I don't want 100 separate files for my to-watch list.
And I've tried a few of the Obsidian database plugins too, but as far as keyboard usability none of them came close to VisiData or LibreOffice.
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#94I've built quite a few dashboards while working on proof-of-concept feature/product engineering. Even though people often think I'm joking, almost always the backend database was a Google Sheet. Google Sheets has great API support, easy to write functionality, convenient read and file dumps, works well with Pandas/SQL, and has a universally appreciated UX. Data validation can be annoying if the "admin" directly enter…
Monzo (online bank in UK) let you see all your transactions in a Google sheet (with some caveats e.g. interest earned is skipped). I wanted to make a total wealth chart over all years.
It's so damn complicated in Google sheets. In MS Excel I could simply make a pivot chart, apply any aggregation on days/weeks and be done with it. But with Sheets I had to make a new aggregate column, filter data in another new column, and make a chart on that.
Your comment does explain that API is why they export to sheets and not excel but Google sheets is way behind in ease of use.
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#95I've built quite a few dashboards while working on proof-of-concept feature/product engineering. Even though people often think I'm joking, almost always the backend database was a Google Sheet. Google Sheets has great API support, easy to write functionality, convenient read and file dumps, works well with Pandas/SQL, and has a universally appreciated UX. Data validation can be annoying if the "admin" directly enter…
+1 for googlesheets. It is stable, and provided you don't exceed the API limits, you can run a lot of data through it.
Appscript is also incredibly powerful if you work with tools that have decent APIs. With a few lines of js and the built in trigger functions, you can have an automatically updating dashboard with email notifications when certain conditions are met (e.g. balance too low, user engagement metric does X etc).
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
to be fair, 25k rows seems like a few more rows than I'd use a spreadsheet for
Unreasonably large spreadsheets are surprisingly common. Excel 2007's row limit was 65536, and nowadays it's over a million. Spreadsheets actually get that big, too.
An app I worked on once wanted a Google Sheets Integration - just a quick button to import rows from the database and into the spreadsheet so that the client can do some quick visualization and pie charts (I offered them a readonly DB account but they didn't know any SQL).
Few years have passed, and there are currently 470 THOUSAND rows with 20+ columns in that spreadsheet which is used almost daily.
Rewriting this into a proper web app would take maybe a week (the API is already there and used by GS), but was never deemed a priority, so it will keep existing in the backlog until we hit row or cell limits - after which it will suddenly become urgent...
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#97Tried to use Glide a few years ago and couldn't understand why it is needed anyway in real life? It seems like toy for startup-guys, not for real MVP's or something valuable.
I like Google Sheets and Google Docs but this app is so strange. Maybe it's ok for small "homemade" projects for neighbourhoods or local businesses like flower salon or fitness club. But why it is needed for these type of business if we have social media, messengers, WPA and adaptive layouts on websites.
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#98Is that an ad? It definitely sounds like one.
Definitely an ad.
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#99Why 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.
He kind of answered you in TFA:
> I can feel some people reading this article demanding that I just learn Swift or some mobile-friendly JavaScript package and make some real apps, but I steadfastly refuse. I enjoy the messy middle of programming, where I have just enough app, API, and logic knowledge to make something small for my friends and family that's always accessible on this little computer I carry everywhere, but I have no ambitions to make it "real."
Re: I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps
#100This is giving me flashbacks to the days when MS Access (and later on Visual Basic) ruled this segment of the market.
It's interesting to think there's still a market for this type of small scale enthusiast application.
One scenarios I've been thinking about recently is the death of the generic app.
If LLMs end up being able to create software easily, why wouldn't we choose to have software that's totally aligned our specific needs?