I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by remus » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 1:29 PM UTC

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?

> if you're worried about a machine seeing your private stuff, why did you type it into a keyboard in the first place?

Who owns that machine is important though. I don't mind putting my card details in via my phone to buy something because there's a level of trust in the whole system (it's my phone, I have a level of trust that google is not going to steal my card details via android, and a level of trust that the shop is legit and will process my order.)

If some random person off the street asked me to type my card details into their phone that's a very different ball game as I don't inherently trust them.

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

#132

Post by p2detar » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 1:45 PM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #71

zie wrote: post #50

I 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…

If you have more than a few thousand records, this is the wrong tool for the job. I've used Google Sheets as a "database" for a few applications in the past. In each case, it was an internal tool that did not generate more than a few thousand records, if that.

A few thousand like the product of rows*cols? Just curious.

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

#133

Post by mrbluecoat » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 1:54 PM UTC

santa_boy wrote: post #65

Glide 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...

This is great, thanks for sharing!

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

#134

Post by dvdsgl » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 2:08 PM UTC

e12e wrote: post #18

Opening Glide on my phone, I'm greeted with: > Open Glide on a large screen to build apps. I get it - but a little ironic that one can't get started with an existing sheet...

Yes, we agree.

We have a mobile experience in the works! https://glideapps.com/create

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

#135

Post by dvdsgl » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 2:09 PM UTC

d--b wrote: post #91

Is that an ad? It definitely sounds like one.

Founder of Glide (YC W19) here. This article surprised us and is not paid.

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

#136

Post by layer8 » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 2:10 PM UTC

hliyan wrote: post #71

zie wrote: post #50

I 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…

If you have more than a few thousand records, this is the wrong tool for the job. I've used Google Sheets as a "database" for a few applications in the past. In each case, it was an internal tool that did not generate more than a few thousand records, if that.

Even text files (like CSV) are fine for the amount of data the OP has trouble with, and Excel certainly is, so it’s unclear why Google Sheets should already balk on that. Google Sheets has a limit of 10 million cells per sheet (so for 25000 rows that would be 400 columns), and really shouldn’t be running into errors for sheets below that limit.

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

#137

Post by mrbluecoat » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 2:13 PM UTC

ijidak wrote: post #54

I'm looking for a no code platform that I can use for my customers and charge a subscription for access. Most of these no-code solutions target internal company Intranets. But, I want to use them for apps I can sell to customers. Does anyone have recommendations?

As mentioned by another poster, check out "Partner portals" section on https://retool.com/

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

#138

Post by dvdsgl » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 2:19 PM UTC

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 simple spreadsheet-to-PWA trick but is now a complete programming model and runtime platform for data-driven business apps, including APIs, databases, responsive layouts, a managed AI system, and workflow automations.

One of our Crown Jewels is our data editor, where you program your app with our reactive computed columns. Our data grid has become a popular open source component: https://grid.glideapps.com/

You can also try our new AI-native builder experience, where we’re trying to simplify building even further. It’s very early but just shows our continued effort to make building software simpler: https://glideapps.com/create

Thanks again!

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

#139

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 2:28 PM UTC

bewal416 wrote: post #51

We built an entire app for our golf league- all using Glide and Google Sheets. It was honestly a great experience- all the players had a great mobile experience with obvious forms and leaderboards, while the storage and compute was hidden inside the Google Sheet. The pricing was pretty reasonable- considering we could split the bill among us all, and we only needed it for about 4 months. There’s still hope for good,…

[deleted]

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

#140

Post by dvdsgl » Tue, Dec 31, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

zie wrote: post #50

I 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…

Hello! Founder of Glide FTA.

Yes, many of our customers hit the issues you mentioned as they scale spreadsheet-based applications. We built Big Tables for this case: https://www.glideapps.com/big-tables

You keep most of the convenience and programmability of a spreadsheet, but you get Postgres scale and a first-class API (which includes atomic table swapping for updating large datasets). It also supports live updating of any views displaying that data.