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I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps

arstechnica.com

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

#151

Post by dcre »

llamaimperative wrote: post #129
dcre wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tea…

I’m a heavy Obsidian user personally, started using Fibery for my startup, and now I’m starting to use Fibery for personal stuff over Obsidian as well. Obsidian is a better note-taker, but Fibery is much more programmable and has the most important OOTB feature of Obsidian which is bidirectional linking (IMO). I don’t think Fibery gives you less control except in the sense of like data ownership (which is what brough…

Funny about backlinks — Notion has had them since 2020 and I've never once looked at the backlinks for a given page. I don't think any of my pages link to each other.

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

#152

Post by flanbiscuit »

dvdsgl wrote: post #138

Founder of Glide (YC W19) mentioned in the article — thanks for the recognition. This was not an ad from us, we were surprised by the coverage. Glide’s customers are businesses building software for internal use. During YC we called these “dark apps” but since then we call them “apps for work.” We wanted something usable by IT and operations staff (not developers) that emphasized design and UX. Glide started as a sim…

I remember when you launched your product on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19163081

I favorited it back then. Glad to see it's doing well, it looks like a cool product. I haven't found a reason to use it yet but that's also because I have slowed down on coding personal projects after work in general.

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

#153

Post by switch007 »

Too wrote: post #109
d--b wrote: post #91

Is that an ad? It definitely sounds like one.

Either that, or the author has a really odd fixation that warrants spending $69/month, just to share a list of nearby restaurants with his wife?

That's definitely it !

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

#154

Post by ezst »

anyfactor wrote: post #46

I'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…

If I want a database set up in minutes just to focus on the business side and nothing else, I simply fire up a new Django project (I suspect any other framework with an ORM and auto-generated CRUD UIs would be equally competent for that).

I have nothing against Google Sheets, I really haven't put much thought into it in this context, but I would need some convincing that it's a better and easier way to kick things off.

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

#155

Post by sneak »

londons_explore wrote: post #127
homebrewer wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're fine with Google seeing complete information about your income and spending? I'm not one of those truly paranoid, but this seems like a bit too much.

I only care about humans seeing my data. Most big tech companies very rarely/never let a human review private customer data. Therefore I'm fine handing all the data over to big tech companies. I don't really understand any other point of view - if you're worried about a machine seeing your private stuff, why did you type it into a keyboard in the first place?

> Most big tech companies very rarely/never let a human review private customer data. Therefore I'm fine handing all the data over to big tech companies.

This isn't true. Google and Apple and others turn over user data to human analysts at NSA and FBI and others without search warrants all of the time, on hundreds of thousands of user accounts per year.

To be fine handing all the data over to big tech companies, you have to be fine handing all of the data over to US federal cops and intelligence services, too, because that's what giving the data (in non-e2ee form) to big tech means.

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

#156

Post by mattfrommars »

rashidae wrote: post #85

During COVID, I built a quick no-code solution to help ‘all-inclusive resorts’ in Cancun and Punta Cana. It started with guests scanning a QR code, filling out a short form, and scheduling their Antigen/PCR tests. Over time, it evolved to help nurses manage operations, streamline test results, and send certificates via email. What began as a DIY project during lockdown scaled quickly to Mexico City, the Dominican Rep…

This is great and I look forward to your YouTube video. It is intriguing to me since you went you choose existing tool and piped the entire workflow vs to build the entire thing from scratch in Python, for example.

In the demo Loom video, the part where you are scheduling an appointment, it looks very calendly like but it is not. Did you build the entire UI and UX yourself?

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

#158

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

ezst wrote: post #154
anyfactor wrote: post #46

I'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…

If I want a database set up in minutes just to focus on the business side and nothing else, I simply fire up a new Django project (I suspect any other framework with an ORM and auto-generated CRUD UIs would be equally competent for that). I have nothing against Google Sheets, I really haven't put much thought into it in this context, but I would need some convincing that it's a better and easier way to kick things of…

That Django project needs a host to run on, even if it's just your local machine.

If you want others to interact with it, you need to expose it to the internet through some means and think through the security implications of doing so.

The Google Sheets approach doesn't need you to manage a process or web server. It is instantly shareable while letting Google worry about security, performance, availability, etc.

The specifics of the "what's better?" ratio can shift depending on comfort level / experience with either product, or what infrastructure you may already have available to deploy to. But building on top of GApps does mean you get a lot of useful aspects "free".

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

#159

Post by dcre »

wim wrote: post #115
dcre wrote: post #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 o…

We're building Thymer [1] for this, which is end-to-end encrypted, offline-first and optionally self-hostable. It's like an editor but you can organize anything into custom database views, we hope to get it ready soon. [1] https://thymer.com/

Very cool! Will be keeping an eye out for it.

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

#160

Post by smileybarry »

This looks great, but I got a bit of sticker shock when I saw Glide's plan to do this is $69 per month cost (billed yearly). There's a free tier, but with a 1-app limit and only Big Tables (no Google Sheets). I'd be fine with paying for personal apps, but $69/month feels a bit... steep.
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