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Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

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Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#81

Post by nickff »

cbdumas wrote: post #73

I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do. I work with business stakeholders creating internal…

I think you are radically underestimating the perceived barriers to entry with programming. You sound a lot like the Linux advocates who think everyone should just memorize a bunch of commands, and get used to using shell. This type of insider view is often referred to as 'the curse of knowledge'.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#82

Post by kmnc »

syshum wrote: post #45
t0mas88 wrote: post #17

I'm very eager to see the Office 365 answer to this. Microsoft is the one that needs to come up with a defensive play here, because this is an area where Excel is used in many businesses both small and large. I'm guessing Microsoft could do a better job than AWS integrating this with Excel and the Office 365 or MS Teams kind of UI to make it feel at home to their users. On the other hand, AWS is ahead now and likely…

>>because this is an area where Excel is used in many businesses both small and large Those people are not going to be giving up Excel for this. I have tried for years to get people to use other better tools than excel, it is a non-starter Power Excel Users will not stop using Excel for either PowerApps or this AWS Product

Yep, getting people off Excel for fully packaged software is hard enough.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#83

Post by fomojola »

tlrobinson wrote: post #71
fomojola wrote: post #27

As an aside: I've been reading the AWS blog posts from Jeff Barr, but ignoring the Amazon Polly audio conversions. I actually listened to it today, and not only is it not terrible, but there's a moment (around 1:05 in or so) where you can actually hear an inhalation! I know @jeffbarr is sometimes in these threads: is that a standard feature of AWS Polly, or is there some preprocessing that is generating SSML to contr…

It still sounds very robotic to me. I think Google's WaveNet sounds much more natural: https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech#section-2

There's a personal taste element: I agree with you that certain WaveNet voices sound better (I've actually used them for video narration with some success). The breathing caught me off guard: it took me a minute to identify THAT as the element that was there but I implicitly wasn't expecting to hear.

The breathing + pausing at commas/full stops and general cadence was frankly superior to what I've seen with Google Cloud Voice, which is why I was curious if preprocessing was done. I've generally had to do multiple manual passes with Google Cloud Voice to get audio output that didn't sound robotic.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#84

Post by coliveira »

cbdumas wrote: post #73

I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do. I work with business stakeholders creating internal…

I agree that coding is the easy part. But exactly because of that it shouldn't get into the way. I really think that is useful to have tools to generate simple apps without coding. Who wants to create the thousandth CRUD app? It is nice to have a tool capable of create apps from simple logic and reserve programming for when it's needed.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#85

Post by basch »

kmnc wrote: post #80
paxys wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a very large target audience which is technical enough to write Excel formulas but not enough to build an app. Your mother or father will never need to use this tool as it is, but those people will.

Wait, who are these people? WYSIWYG App builders have existed for decades and Excel still dominates. Maybe you don't agree, but the main reason for this in my opinion is because these app builders are way too complicated and learning them is largely pointless since their use cases are generally super trivial. Why build an app if Excel+Email works? Further, if these things do start taking off I don't think the people…

These app builders have existed for decades, but its the preloaded integrations that make this generation different. Instant connections to a multitude of cloud databases. Type in your credentials, visualize your data. And these integrations might not just be a database api, but come preloaded with schema to contextualize your database.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#86

Post by eb0la »

dvdhsu wrote: post #68
avolcano wrote: post #3

Looks like a competitor to Retool, interesting. The focus on data permissions, mobile support, and push notifications is really interesting because none of those features are ones that Retool focuses on, I believe - those features being front and center makes me think Amazon has looked at the competition and wants to focus on what they offer that others don't, rather than just trying to be yet-another-tool in the spa…

Hi there! Founder of Retool ( https://retool.com ) here (and long-time HN reader). Agreed that Honeycode is adjacent to us. I think an interesting way of viewing the space [1] is who the product is for. There are lots of drag and drop app-builders (e.g. mendix, outsystems, bubble, msft powerapps, amazon honeycode, etc.), but they're all built for non-technical people. Their goal is to make programming more accessible…

I guess RAD tools (now no-code) will never fade away from the market.

I bet you're getting a lot of traction on corporations that need to upgrade/replace internal tools.

I know, internal tools will always suck because:

1) your market changes faster than you can change your apps, so you're always lagging behind.

2) And technology moves faster than you can keep them to date. That's the reason we still have IE as corporate browser in most enterprises.

Also, 3) nowadays it's very hard to do both good frontend AND backend coding. Technologies diverged a lot since, say, Rails 2.0 (which is just 8 years away from now). And the barrier to compete is higher every day.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#87

Post by cosmodisk »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #34

I am working on a product in this space. I think pretty much all the 'no code' apps that are coming out have taken the wrong approach to it. No matter what, they are still 'designed' by programmers with a programming mentality. This will lead to a sort of failure as people will feel limited when using it, and a 'non programmer' mentality looks at this and goes wtf? For example: > =Filter(Tasks,"Tasks[Done] % ORDER BY…

Well, having seen enough people who will never ever in their lives be able to understand this: =Filter(Tasks,"Tasks[Done]% ORDER BY Tasks[Due]","Yes"

And I'm 100% sure that no company would let them anywhere near that kind of stuff,even if it's vanilla drag and drop. Those people are good at some jobs and task but definitely not at this. Anything designed for purely non technical people usually is just a bit crappy: I taught myself programming so I won't need to deal with Salesforce Flow...

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#88

Post by nightski »

coliveira wrote: post #84
cbdumas wrote: post #73

I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do. I work with business stakeholders creating internal…

I agree that coding is the easy part. But exactly because of that it shouldn't get into the way. I really think that is useful to have tools to generate simple apps without coding. Who wants to create the thousandth CRUD app? It is nice to have a tool capable of create apps from simple logic and reserve programming for when it's needed.

At the end of the day you have to translate requirements into software. Whether that is through a GUI or textual. Textual just happens to be an extremely effective method to do so.

Every application in existence is a CRUD app. Software is just data processing after all, reading and writing bits.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#89

Post by grumple »

nickff wrote: post #81
cbdumas wrote: post #73

I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do. I work with business stakeholders creating internal…

I think you are radically underestimating the perceived barriers to entry with programming. You sound a lot like the Linux advocates who think everyone should just memorize a bunch of commands, and get used to using shell. This type of insider view is often referred to as 'the curse of knowledge'.

Perceived barriers are just that though. This doesn’t remove them - someone still has to learn this system, and you’ve got to pay them to work on it. With a system like this, you’ll quickly come to the cases that business people love to create anyway: you can’t do X with Honeycode but you need to make it happen anyway. And then you’ll wish you’d just done the whole thing in Python.

Re: Amazon Honeycode – build web and mobile apps without writing code

#90

Post by lubujackson »

cbdumas wrote: post #73

I think the thing that "coding without code" fundamentally misses is that learning to actually write Python or Java or whatever is not the hard part of being productive in a business context. The hard part of creating useful software is that you have to understand a business process and its requirements so precisely that you can write it down for the computer to do. I work with business stakeholders creating internal…

That's the theory, but don't forget the time you spend upgrading Python because some dependency needs it, but some other part isn't compatible with the new version so you spend an hour on Google trying to sort that out.

Or the time you spend trying to debug some basic functionality you've written 20 times before because it isn't quite working with everything else for some reason...

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