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Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

geoffreylitt.com

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Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#51

Post by foreigner »

matijash wrote: post #42

I like the demos a lot, it is easy to understand the idea from them! How hard was it to write the browser extension and how well does it work for the different sites? Obviously the main challenge, as other mentioned, is that not all of the data is present on the frontend. Also, user cannot permanently change the app, since just the DOM is changed and that is not persisted anywhere, am I right? But the whole idea to b…

wasp looks awesome! I signed up to your mailing list.

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#52

Post by andybak »

gklitt wrote: post #28

Author here, happy to answer any questions! To bring it full circle, here are a couple recent demo videos I made of using Wildcard to customize the HN front page: https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1229251217118892032

I skimmed the article and it looks very interesting but nothing beats actually trying it out. Did I miss the link to an actual implementation or demo?

Are you eventual plans pure research, productization or open-sourcing it?

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#53

Post by darkhorse13 »

carapace wrote: post #44
gklitt wrote: post #28

Author here, happy to answer any questions! To bring it full circle, here are a couple recent demo videos I made of using Wildcard to customize the HN front page: https://twitter.com/geoffreylitt/status/1229251217118892032

This is really cool, congrats. :-) Are you aware of Ted Nelson's ZigZag data model? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZigZag_(software) It seems like that might work well with Wildcard.

Could you elaborate how it would work with ZigZag? I looked into ZigZag quite a bit, but don't really see the utility in it.

Re: Wildcard: Spreadsheet-Driven Customization of Web Applications

#54

Post by capableweb »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #32

Spreadsheet-Driven Customization is a great way to enable non-technical users to customize and configure software. I used that technique for a one-off Java application back in 2011. The Java application did not do any live synchronization with the spreadsheet like Wildcard does. It just read the spreadsheet at application start-up to get configuration data needed to drive the application logic. Spreadsheet-driven cus…

Yup, doing the same for a frontend we're currently building. Basically some of the core features exposes warnings (on purpose) to the user once they do an action that they might want to do in a different way. These errors just have error codes assigned to them on the backend side and the frontend loads the real messages from AirTable on boot, which then is used to show the user-friendly title and description. We're doing the same thing for a couple of things and it has really cut down and development time as product team can now change the frontend themselves by just editing cells in AirTable instead of creating tasks for the development team.
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