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Show HN: Strukt – a visual shell for tabular data
- wellpast 9y agoLooks interesting. I would love to use over some of my sqlite data. Unfortunately $30 is too steep for this with no reviews and no demo version.
- ken 9y agoI think $30 is fair, considering the work I put into it. What price would you be willing to pay for this? For a demo version, in what way would you expect it to be limited? I've considered making a demo version (or making it free with IAPs), but databases would be the first thing to go. Would that still be sufficient for you to evaluate it?
- alexchamberlain 9y agoWhat about a demo version that comes with pre-installed datasets?
- ejfox 9y agoPersonally, I'd prefer a 14-day trial with all functionality that stops working after the allotted period.
- ken 9y agoHow do these work? Does it drop a secret file on your computer somewhere that says "installed at timestamp X"? Does each download include "downloaded at timestamp X" as part of the app (so the user can just download it again)? Does it send some piece of data back to the server saying "person X started the trial at time Y"? I'm leaning towards a partially-featured free version that works for all time, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise.
- CJefferson 9y agoChecking a secret file is probably the easiest option. Of course anything is hackable, but the again it's probably easier for someone to just hack the full version of your app, depending on how you protect that.
- 0xcoffee 9y agoThe safest way is to create a version with features literally stripped out, not just hidden behind a boolean. (Rolling your own DRM is akin to rolling your own cryptography, it probably won't be very effective to malicious actors) This won't stop someone buying your app, cracking and releasing it, but it means they will have to spend at least $30 to do so.
- reitanqild 9y agoHow do these work? Some alternatives: - secret key file - some kind of hashing/crypto. Something like a hash of <email>:<version1>:<yoursecrethash> and check against the customers keyfile. Advantage: the file doesn't need to be secret, customer will have to sign up and get a keyfile by mail. (Of course those who want to hack will just find and nop out the relevant assembly instructions) - check online for valid license (can be also be patched out easily unless you really put some effort into it) - of course there is hardware keys which again can be easily circumvented unless you put some effort into the implementation I'm leaning towards a partially-featured free version that works for all time, but I'm willing to be convinced otherwise. Disadvantages on time limited: People will find a way to reset all settings, reinstall and use it for another 14 days. Disadvantages on feature limited: Those who only need the limited feature set has it forever - those who need the extended features won't get a chance to test them. I'm leaning towards full featured, time limited. Those who want to hack it will havk it anyway.
- ezekg 9y agoIf you're serious about licensing your app outside of the app store (the app store doesn't allow custom licensing systems), I'd love to chat about what your needs are. I'm the founder of an app licensing API called Keygen[0] that supports feature-licenses. :) [0]: https://keygen.sh https://keygen.sh
- wellpast 9y agoI'll happily pay $30 for it if it fits my needs. But I won't pay $30 to find out if it works for me or not. A limited trial would be great.
- bsg75 9y agoA demo that limits the number of data points it will work with. Perhaps 100 rows or objects?
- reitanqild 9y agoI'd say $30 is a very nice price for what this seems to be but in my case it is 1. well out of impulse purchase range for me (which matters since no demo seems to be available) 2. not available on any of my preferred platforms (i.e. Linux and Windows)
- willcodeforfoo 9y agoLooks very cool, would love to play with a demo before dropping $30 though...
- positivecomment 9y agoThey could have used Electron or Qt and supported all platforms. Also, why not offer a trial version?
- ummjackson 9y agoHandling and manipulating data in an obfuscated web environment (Electron) is not fun. Native will undoubtedly offer better memory handling and performance.
- yellowapple 9y agoThen use Qt, which is native and cross-platform.
- fiddlerwoaroof 9y agoI find qt on mac to be really unpleasant.
- evv 9y agoWhy do you consider electron to be an "obfuscated" web environment? I would argue that electron provides you with much better control than you'd get in a traditional web environment/browser. > Native will undoubtedly offer better memory handling and performance. True, but that seems to be a tradeoff that people are ready to make these days. For a lot of organizations, it is just too convenient to build cross-platform desktop apps using the web development skillset. Although I must admit that, as a React Native contributor, I hoped for something like RN to take off on desktops in addition to mobile. It would provide far more control over the performance than electron because you'd be able to write native code alongside your JS, avoid overhead of the DOM and CSS, and even tune the JS VM for your application.
- msimpson 9y agoYou've expressed my exact sentiment. This really should be platform agnostic.
- ummjackson 9y agoThis looks fantastic. Agree with others that a trial or free version would be great to test drive it.
- ken 9y agoI agree that a trial would be great. My only excuse is that I'm (so far) just one person. Not enough hours in the day! But message received.
- hprotagonist 9y ago>Your connection is not private > >Attackers might be trying to steal your information from www.freerobotcollective.com (for example, passwords, messages, or credit cards). NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID
- neoCrimeLabs 9y agoThis looks potentially useful and I would love to give it a try. Any chances of supporting an operating system other than OSX in the future?
- ken 9y agoIt's a native Mac app, but the backend and frontend are pretty separate, so it's not out of the question. That said, it's not a high priority at this point, and it seems like it would be a ton of work, especially for just one person (me). A secondary concern is that, because it takes advantage of the Mac's built-in frameworks, there are some things which look rather difficult to me on other platforms. I can probably find a replacement for MapKit, and maybe QuickLook. The features of Spotlight I'm using seem to have no analog on any other platform. GCD is open-source and there seem to be some forks that have ports but I'm not sure what the status is. Overall, I'd rather provide a great experience on one platform than a mediocre experience on several. To do cross-platform well, even if you're using a cross-platform UI framework, you really need at least one person dedicated to each platform. I would not be able to do justice to a Windows version at all. Now, if anybody out there is interested in investing so I can hire a team of people to help me do this, I'm all ears. :-)
- vinceguidry 9y agoI just invested $30, that'll get you at least 6 Fiverr devs!
- ljw1001 9y agoIf you don't mind sharing, Im curious what library you used for the charts?
- ken 9y agoI wrote it myself. One of my key features has always been that everything is streaming (unless it's algorithmically impossible, like Sort), and I couldn't find any Mac charting widget that supported streaming input. That's why its feature set is rather minimalist. I'm not opposed to using a third-party charting library, if there's a good one that supports what I need, but at the time I wrote that, there wasn't.
- wizzard0 9y agoIf it really works as advertised, I'd happily purchase it right away. But I need Windows or Linux version.
- Void_ 9y agoThis solves a slightlu different problem, but with a very interesting approach: https://median.tech https://median.tech
- ken 9y agoAgreed, on both counts. Someday I hope my charting module is as slick as theirs!
- fiatjaf 9y agoMan, this is amazing. If I manage to get some time I'll surely work on an open-source version of this based on jq.
- fiatjaf 9y agoBefore you think about doing a demo version or whatever, I suggest that you make a video screencast. Or multiple small video screencasts.
- vinceguidry 9y agoI purchased it sight unseen. I'd love to see database interfaces added, so I can pull from and dump directly to a database, but this looks really cool!
- ken 9y agoThanks! Is there a particular database you're interested in? I have about 5 on my to-do list, for the near future, but the order of implementation is still flexible.
- vinceguidry 9y agoPostgreSQL is the only one I use really. Would be great if it could accept a connection string.
- ken 9y agoGood news: that's at the top of my list already! I'm also planning to have some way to easily save/reuse data sources (like connection strings) to accompany this, because you're not going to want to type in a connection string more than once.
- benwilber0 9y agoMySQL for sure!
- ken 9y agoThat's on my list, too! I don't use it myself but it's definitely an important one.
- peternicky 9y agoCan you share initial thoughts?
- DEinspanjer 9y agoWhy does it want to access my contacts?
- ken 9y agoIt has data source operations for listing Contacts, Calendars, and Calendar Events. One of the main drivers for this project was that a lot of my data was trapped in these custom data stores, and I wanted to be able to access everything from the same place. (Why can't I grep my calendar events?) It only reads these when you explicitly use these operations, and it never writes to them.
- lgas 9y agoProbably better to wait to ask for the permission until someone is attempting an operation that requires that permission.
- ken 9y agoOhhh ... is it asking you for permission, when you first start the app? That's not cool. I can see why it would do that, but that wasn't my intention. That should be easy to fix. Thanks! UPDATE: OK, confirmed, and a fix is ready. 1.2.1 will not ask to see your Contacts until you use the relevant operation.
- DEinspanjer 9y agoWell, I didn't do too well. I saw the welcome screen offering to let me read the manual. I like manuals, but I figured I'd poke around first. I clicked on each of the samples, but none of them really appealed to me. The closest was the "Hot Cities" one. I then tried to load a file to look at. I hit enter and got a new operation, typed file and saw "Load File", but couldn't figure out how to enter the filename. :( I did lots of enter and tab and such, but finally gave up and opened the manual. After reading through it, I discovered that I was supposed to use - to select an argument and = to enter a value for it. Still not quite used to that, but I'll say you really need some sort of intro tooltip to help people figure that out. So, I entered the filename, and it gave me the little orange minus flag. Clicked it and saw it didn't have authorization. Clicked the Help question icon and read that I had to predefine a list of folders it could access. I haven't purchased too many Mac Store apps, maybe this is some limitation of that, but I've never had an app before that couldn't access a file without my first telling it where it was allowed to look. Is that really necessary? So I added a data directory to the allowed list and then I saw the contents of my file. Yay! This file is a dump of a Kafka topic. It has a line per record, each record has a JSON key, a tab character, and then a JSON value. So, I went to add the second operation to my pipeline. The first few tries, I kept overriding my Load File operation, but then I got the hang of using the down arrow to get a new one. I have an outstanding question on how to insert one between two steps, but I haven't needed to do it yet so I haven't experimented. I first tried to use Split String to break up the key and value fields, but found I couldn't enter a tab character either via \t or by pasting it. I saw a note that said not to use Split String for CSV or TSV, so I next tried the TSV operation. TSV was able to break it up into two fields, but I don't have any control over specifying the keys for the fields, it just automatically eats the first row of data and uses it as the key name. :( So I poked around looking for a way to fix that, saw the option to change key names, but that wouldn't get my first row of data back, so I opened the file in Vim and gave it a header. Came back to Strukt and reloaded. I then tried to add a Parse JSON operator. First tried to point it at the "key" field, got nothing back, so I tried the "value" field. Still nothing. Hitting the Play button takes 1.85s but returns zero rows. No indication of what went wrong. That is where I stopped cause I have work to do. Sorry that this is kinda a negative review. Don't let it get you down, there is a lot of promise in the concept and interface. Feel free to poke me for further info if you need it. I'm coming from the world of Pentaho Data Integration and command line utilities, and I love playing with data apps.
- mrmondo 9y agoLooks really interesting and really pleased to see it's a native app and not javascript in a web frame, thanks for taking the time to start this. The price is quite high though - do you have a demo?
- avalonalex 9y agoIs is possible to use css selector to pick up content from html?
- ken 9y agoUnfortunately, no, but that's a reasonable request. The only ways to get data out of HTML right now are from a table or list.
- chenster 9y agoThe UI somehow reminds me the Tableau https://www.tableau.com/new-features/10.0 https://www.tableau.com/new-features/10.0 but much more keyboard friendly by leveraging *inx command line. BTW, Tableau is a $6B industry. I too agree with putting up a screencast or a free lite version.
- sandGorgon 9y agoCheck out Handsontable or Ag-grid. This is a market you can address and sell immediately too. Lots of us are keen to build internal tools that do spreadsheet in the front end and server on the back end. If you can build a turnkey aoliti2for the web (with an API), that's easily monetizable.
- warpech 9y agoWhat is aoliti2for?
- beyondcompute 9y agoCan’t use it because it requires too new a MacOS version :)
- garyclarke27 9y agoLooks v interesting and tempting to buy, but lack of documentation, videos and trial put's me off. You don't even say how much it is?? Just a broken app store link, that doesn't work on iPad. If you add Postgres data source I would probably buy sight unseen. If you add a simple form builder that can call Postgres functions (Not direct to table) for basic CRUD I would most definitly buy and happy to pay $200+.
- aetherspawn 9y agoLooks great, was tempted to buy. Need a video/demo version .. or a limited trial, or something. Also, database support for MySQL, MSSQL and postgres would be the cherry on top. Does it support REST (json or even xml)?
- ken 9y agoIt has a "Load URL" operation, which can be used to GET resources. (You want arbitrary verbs, I assume?) It has a "Parse JSON" operation, though some people here have run into some limitations of that. Next week I will have better JSON support! It doesn't really support XML parsing yet. It can get data from HTML tables and lists. There's a lot of possible ways to convert a tree (XML) into a table, and many are not useful, so I'm going to have to give this some thought. If you have an example of an XML document or API response that you'll want to parse, that would be super helpful.