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Airtable did some great work on the UX. Introducing people to table schemas with typed columns is pretty awesome, and the creative way they've leveraged that wi

Airtable did some great work on the UX. Introducing people to table schemas with typed columns is pretty awesome, and the creative way they've leveraged that with the little tab that comes out of the side for either a nice view over the data (e.g. a map for an address column) or for showing Pivot Tables/Aggregations. They deserve some design awards for those ideas. But it's not a great alternative to a DB. It's really expensive per seat (twice the cost of Google Apps and you only get one app). The row limits on tables are too low. And I'd really like native webhook support to ingest row updates. I'd be very interested an Airtable clone that I can run locally on-top of Postgres or Mongo or something like that. My main use-case would be to replace expensive-to-build internal CRUD apps that really should just be spreadsheets but require bespoke integrations with other internal systems.

nojvek 7y ago
Awesome. Thanks for Validating. I'm going to spend the next year of my life building exactly that. Right now I've just put it a manifesto with some ideas at http://orows.com http://orows.com, but will be coming out with a proof of concept very soon.
- henryfjordan 7y ago
  Cool! I'll add one more thought that I think might be particularly useful > Granular permissions not only at row level but field level too. You can share parts of data with others for editing or have it view-only with ability for commenting and accepting suggestions In my org (and I suspect many), many of the Sales/Operations people maintain Google Sheets with links into our internal apps. Generally it's TODO lists or other little organizational/workflow type stuff What I think makes Airtable so powerful is that foreign-keys are first class. You can create a table and include references to rows from other tables. This allows the end user to create tables to support their workflows directly in the same tool they use to manage the data, and means I don't have to build that same functionality into the CRUD app (and until you're deep in a workflow it's hard to get it perfect, so there's always back-and-forth). A good permission system would allow me to create a set of "core tables" that I tightly control the schema of, but allow others to still create tables which reference this one.
  - nojvek 7y ago
    That makes total sense. Yeah you want to see tables with relationships/hyperlink to other tables. Deffo don’t want to be manually joining ids everytime.
    - henryfjordan 7y ago
      It's more than that though, it's that I need to be able to create "core tables" that only privileged users can modify the schema of, but then let anyone create tables with relationships to those core tables.
  - brianjoseff 7y ago
    I'm interested in link density and diversity in those little workflow supporting spreadsheets you mention. Do you have some examples? We're building a sort of highly linkable (cell level) spreadsheet-type widget builder that is supposed to play nicely with existing workflows (instead of trying to force people to build out entire workflows like many of these new breed of "CRUD-replacer" low-code/no-code apps seem to want us to do). Might interest you!
    - henryfjordan 7y ago
      I can't share anything directly but let me describe a little scenario for you that's close enough: We have a CRUD app that acts as a CMS with all our product listings in it. There is a team of people who are tasked with curating and maintaining these product listings. So you can go to crud.com/admin/product/<id> and modify the listing, which needs to happen every now and then. The team of people who maintain these product listings need to coordinate their efforts and so when they need to modify some set of the products they create a spreadsheet with (product_id, link_to_crud.com, Person who is responsible, status). Maybe there's some approval process or multiple statuses or something like that that makes this all a little more custom/complex. Maybe they need to update a few things across services at the same-ish time so there might be a few links per row but it's going to be relatively bounded by what a human can handle. If our data lived in Airtable, it'd be really easy for this team to make their tables/spreadsheets with direct relations to our core tables (which replace the CRUD app in this case). That team understands their workflows better than I ever will as an engineer. Giving them the power to create their own workflow tools is way better than trying to have engineering build it for them, and that's going to be a huge selling point for me. I don't think we'd need cell-level links but rather row-level. Right now they use Google sheets, but a more domain-specific tool would be better.
eat_veggies 7y ago
Retool seems like what you want! https://retool.com/ https://retool.com/
harrisreynolds 7y ago
Airtable has done a great job with their UX! I've started working on a similar platform where the goal is to make building CRUD apps wildly simple. The plan going forward will be to layer on more sophistication after the core foundation is extremely solid. The platform uses Mongo for the dynamic data tables which is a game changer for tools like this. Postgres jsonb data would also work, but Mongo just feels more natural to me. I've named the platform Webase. Check it out here: https://www.webase.com https://www.webase.com Note: this is very basic currently but consistently getting better!
- henryfjordan 7y ago
  Hey I made an account but only see > You have not created any apps yet. with no way to create an app that I can see

nojvek 7y ago

Awesome. Thanks for Validating. I'm going to spend the next year of my life building exactly that. Right now I've just put it a manifesto with some ideas at http://orows.com http://orows.com, but will be coming out with a proof of concept very soon.

henryfjordan 7y ago
Cool! I'll add one more thought that I think might be particularly useful > Granular permissions not only at row level but field level too. You can share parts of data with others for editing or have it view-only with ability for commenting and accepting suggestions In my org (and I suspect many), many of the Sales/Operations people maintain Google Sheets with links into our internal apps. Generally it's TODO lists or other little organizational/workflow type stuff What I think makes Airtable so powerful is that foreign-keys are first class. You can create a table and include references to rows from other tables. This allows the end user to create tables to support their workflows directly in the same tool they use to manage the data, and means I don't have to build that same functionality into the CRUD app (and until you're deep in a workflow it's hard to get it perfect, so there's always back-and-forth). A good permission system would allow me to create a set of "core tables" that I tightly control the schema of, but allow others to still create tables which reference this one.
- nojvek 7y ago
  That makes total sense. Yeah you want to see tables with relationships/hyperlink to other tables. Deffo don’t want to be manually joining ids everytime.
  - henryfjordan 7y ago
    It's more than that though, it's that I need to be able to create "core tables" that only privileged users can modify the schema of, but then let anyone create tables with relationships to those core tables.
- brianjoseff 7y ago
  I'm interested in link density and diversity in those little workflow supporting spreadsheets you mention. Do you have some examples? We're building a sort of highly linkable (cell level) spreadsheet-type widget builder that is supposed to play nicely with existing workflows (instead of trying to force people to build out entire workflows like many of these new breed of "CRUD-replacer" low-code/no-code apps seem to want us to do). Might interest you!
  - henryfjordan 7y ago
    I can't share anything directly but let me describe a little scenario for you that's close enough: We have a CRUD app that acts as a CMS with all our product listings in it. There is a team of people who are tasked with curating and maintaining these product listings. So you can go to crud.com/admin/product/<id> and modify the listing, which needs to happen every now and then. The team of people who maintain these product listings need to coordinate their efforts and so when they need to modify some set of the products they create a spreadsheet with (product_id, link_to_crud.com, Person who is responsible, status). Maybe there's some approval process or multiple statuses or something like that that makes this all a little more custom/complex. Maybe they need to update a few things across services at the same-ish time so there might be a few links per row but it's going to be relatively bounded by what a human can handle. If our data lived in Airtable, it'd be really easy for this team to make their tables/spreadsheets with direct relations to our core tables (which replace the CRUD app in this case). That team understands their workflows better than I ever will as an engineer. Giving them the power to create their own workflow tools is way better than trying to have engineering build it for them, and that's going to be a huge selling point for me. I don't think we'd need cell-level links but rather row-level. Right now they use Google sheets, but a more domain-specific tool would be better.

eat_veggies 7y ago

Retool seems like what you want! https://retool.com/ https://retool.com/

harrisreynolds 7y ago

Airtable has done a great job with their UX! I've started working on a similar platform where the goal is to make building CRUD apps wildly simple. The plan going forward will be to layer on more sophistication after the core foundation is extremely solid. The platform uses Mongo for the dynamic data tables which is a game changer for tools like this. Postgres jsonb data would also work, but Mongo just feels more natural to me. I've named the platform Webase. Check it out here: https://www.webase.com https://www.webase.com Note: this is very basic currently but consistently getting better!

henryfjordan 7y ago
Hey I made an account but only see > You have not created any apps yet. with no way to create an app that I can see