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Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

airtable.com

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Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#21

Post by howsta »

tunesmith wrote: post #13

How does this compares to products like Bento (RIP) and Filemaker?

Hi, the biggest differences between us and Bento/Filemaker/MSAccess (and even older products like Ashton Tate's dBase, Lotus Approach, etc) are:

1) Airtable is seamlessly realtime and instantly shareable with collaborators (which we believe is highly important for most use cases).

All those other products required desktop software installation, and sharing a DB with multiple users required involved setting up a networked shared drive with a file that was concurrently accessed by multiple users.

2) Airtable supports a full fledged mobile, simple-to-use interface. Mobile access is increasingly important, and none of those products provided a mobile interface (with the exception of Bento). Our mobile app instantly syncs all your changes with the web interface, or other shared collaborators.

3) Airtable supports the speed of data entry of a grid based interface on the web, while maintaining database structure (typed columns, 1 row = 1 record) which means we can alternately display records as cards (on mobile) or in the future, points on a map, events on a calendar, etc. Many of the other products forced you to use a form-based interface for record creation/editing, rather than allowing grid-based editing.

4) More modern paradigm. We support features like @mentions, row comments, direct file uploads from dropbox/box/google drive, etc, that add a useful collaboration layer on top of just the raw data.

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#23

Post by howsta »

kolev wrote: post #17

Great... but could be useless without an API.

Hi Kolev! We do have plans to release an API (by end of this year or early next). If you're interested in getting early access and providing feedback on the features you would need, please fill out this form: https://getforma.wufoo.com/forms/q1ijurhh1cp2kfu/ Or, reach out to me directly at howie@airtable.com

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#24

Post by heartbleed »

kolev wrote: post #19
heartbleed wrote: post #18

https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/#airtable.com

Nice! Are you gonna automate checks for each submitted link or this is a one-time thing?

No plans to automate. I would have emailed the OP but couldn't see any contact details in their profile.

Detected via a Firefox extension [1] (there are several on AMO). Given the nature and severity of the vulnerability, and how widespread it still is (I get an alert every few days), I'm surprised everyone doesn't use one.

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxbleed/

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#25

Post by howsta »

orbifold wrote: post #22

Are there any plans to make this scriptable with say Javascript?

We're going to release an API in the near future ( https://airtable.com/api ), but that would be used for server-side integrations (ie you must deploy your own server to host your own code talk to Airtable's servers).

We do want to support some form of scripting that would be hosted on OUR servers, but that's further out on the roadmap. We also have plans to support external integrations and triggers via Zapier/IFTTT.

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#26

Post by addisonj »

Very impressed.

Spreadsheets have never quite "clicked" with me, but this did. It exposes a lot of functionality that your average person would want out of a spreadsheet in a much friendlier way.

I am really curious on the "database" side though, can this handle a couple of tables with 10k rows linking to one another? Maybe an API that allows me to return JSON with some query language? If so, would be a great tool for CRM like tools and any small/medium data set where a nice UI for editing would come in handy

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#27

Post by victorantos »

christiangenco wrote: post #12

This looks fantastic! I was drooling during the demo video - you've improved on so many things from the standard spreadsheet at once. If I could make a request for the API: it's almost impossible to get a simple JSON serialization of a table in Google Spreadsheets. There are so many times where I just want to make a really simple MVP with a backend data source, but don't want a full-fledged Firebase database. If I co…

You could try http://apifox.com to create a simple JSON api instead of spreadsheet

Re: Show HN: Airtable, a real-time spreadsheet-database hybrid

#28

Post by aofstad »

Erwin wrote: post #20

Here's one use case: i tried importing a 500+ row wine spreadsheet into it (it has columns like type, producer, name, vintage, rating, source etc). I had to save the file as CSV and import it -- or at least that's what I thought, but filepicker seems to support picking from google drive. I don't know if it would have accepted a spreadsheet. Your app seems sluggish to scroll compared to Google Docs at that size, and t…

Thanks a lot for your feedback, these are definitely things we're looking to tackle.

We're planning on improving scrolling performance soon, it's definitely a priority for us to improve our performance for large datasets.

As for the linking, we definitely want to do more to help you normalize your data. We can also infer column types to help with the import process. Doing this type of thing on paste is an interesting idea.

We have some ideas for how to make it so that you don't need a primary column. One thing that you can do now is make the primary column a formula, and then reference other columns to generate a key.

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