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Permanent - the new spreadsheet for iPad
- tlholaday 14y agoScripting in Lua? Neat!
- mifeng 14y agoI like the design, but the thought of using a spreadsheet without a keyboard makes my head hurt.
- kcl 14y agoYou can hook up a keyboard to your iPad, if you like. Not sure if that would solve your problem. Keyboard support is on our planned list of features. Most iPad users are fine with the touch screen keyboard, so we haven't prioritized physical keyboard support yet.
- mifeng 14y agoI do like where you're going... just had to edit a Google doc spreadsheet on my phone (painful). As a long-time Excel user,I just can't imagine giving up keyboard shortcuts, etc.
- mark-r 14y agoIf you have real work to do it's not unusual to use a bluetooth keyboard. For occasional use I'm sure it's fine.
- podperson 14y agoActually the worst/best thing about Numbers is the way keyboarding on screen is handled (worst in that it's still the worst, best in that they've clearly thought about it and worked hard to make it less bad than it might have been). I think a spreadsheet app that really figures out a solid way of working around the lack of a hardware keyboard might do well (e.g. allowing you to format cells as sliders or spinners or whatever so you don't need to key in values).
- IheartApplesDix 14y agoJust imagining 10-key on a iPad is making me laugh.
- rayiner 14y agoI become more and more convicned every day that a spreadsheet is the ultimate "manage the stuff in my head" interface. Putting it onto an iPad is genius.
- clevernapkins 14y agoI agree, for a while I was a beta tester for another spreadsheet app on the Ipad : http://www.binarythumb.com/ http://www.binarythumb.com/ It's pretty awesome even if you don't do Excel-like things with it. Just having a spreadsheet to organize stuff is really handy on the ipad. I'm going to give this app a try, it looks well put together.
- abuzzooz 14y agoGRID looks very nice. And they do a good job showing off its capabilities in the videos. The only problem is that I couldn't find a link to buy it from. Is it available yet?
- clevernapkins 14y agoI don't believe it's available yet as they recently closed the beta testing period.
- kamakazizuru 14y agowhat would really make or break this for me is if it is compatible with excel sheets..
- kcl 14y agoVersion 1.1 should import/export Excel sheets. Version 1.0 doesn't import/export so that we could launch quicker and make sure everything is stable.
- niggler 14y agoI don't see a way to import or export data, and the app description says that CSV and XLSX and XLS import and export are pending. Sorry, but without a way to bring data in or out this app looks unfinished.
- kcl 14y agoImport/export is coming. Probably in the next release.
- niggler 14y agoAny spreadsheet app should have some sort of import/export support ON LAUNCH DAY. The omission looks sloppy. Just to make it clear, it's not that hard to do it. Here's a very basic example in javascript that took roughly 3 hours of time (this parses enough of the XLSX format to generate a CSV output with a few integers and strings; requires html5 file API to be able to manipulate the file in your browser. Best results on chrome): http://niggler.github.com/js-xlsx/ http://niggler.github.com/js-xlsx/ source: https://github.com/Niggler/js-xlsx https://github.com/Niggler/js-xlsx There's an XLS version as well (doesn't support the full panoply of features): http://niggler.github.com/js-xls/ http://niggler.github.com/js-xls/ source: https://github.com/Niggler/js-xls https://github.com/Niggler/js-xls
- stinky613 14y agoDoes this / will this hook into the Google Spreadsheet API to pull data from Google Docs?
- trpeters1 14y agoI would have done the import/export functionality before adding Lua scripting. No reason to release the product without having the data hooks in place. We don't need more silos.
- glhaynes 14y agoI'll be contrarian and say importing/exporting aren't required for the first release. This isn't about being a replacement for Excel on a computer. It obviously should come soon, though, and my expectation would be to see it in a free update.
- bhntr3 14y agoI wonder if this will work. I feel like spreadsheets are inherently satisficing mechanisms for data. I think the reason excel has done so well is that its a default when normal folks don't really need much. I wonder if people actively seek out "better" spreadsheet tools or if they just seek out tools to do a task better when excel fails. Either way putting it on a tablet will definitely help. EDIT: I should say that I think a better spreadsheet is a really important and interesting thing to build.
- larrywright 14y agoI think this looks very cool from a technical standpoint, but I don't know how useful it is. Especially without a corresponding desktop application.
- lancewiggs 14y agoGreat to see. I expect to be disappointed with this first release, but purchased anyway to support what this could become in the future. The undo functionality provides a glimpse of what possible paths Microsoft has abandoned in favour of never-ending "enhancements" to the UI.
- lancewiggs 14y agoOk and now I am stuck. It's not obvious how to select cells for say '=sum(....'. It's not obvious how to remove a sheet from a project. It's not obvious where I can get help And it's now crashing. So a bit alpha to be charging for it, but please keep going.
- kcl 14y agoYou can bring up the delete button for a sheet by right swiping the sheet's cell after tapping on the project breadcrumb. This sounds clumsy written out. Inside the app the gesture should be natural. Multiple cell selection isn't implemented in 1.0. We had to be choosy about what feature we supported in 1.0, as there are a lot of spreadsheet features people want. Specifying the cells in the formula by typing them out does work, however. The crashes we'll fix. Thanks for the kind words, we'll keep at it.
- danso 14y agoAnything that boosts the profile of the humble spreadsheet gets a thumbs up from me. I almost always start taking notes with a spreadsheet. It may be something as simple as two fields: one for the actual note and two for a category. If it's trivial to add a timestamp, I'll do that too. The notes end up being far more organized than as if I had just put them chronologically into an empty text editor (though in a pinch, I may just write my notes in a tab delimited format and import them into a spreadsheet). Even if I never need to chronologically reverse sort or sort by category. More importantly, when doing a research project, it serves as a checklist for what I need to do. Awhile back I wanted to track homicides in my city and so I started off with just name of victim, name of suspect, age, time of day, link to a news article, time of arrest, address, etc. Without a spreadsheet, you'd forget at least one of those details as you did your research in the traditional note taking fashion. And when you make your model more complex: i.e. realize that you need to record time of arrest, charges filed, age of suspect, etc., the spreadsheet makes it easy to backtrack and fill your past data rows. And when you realize you need to make your data model more complicated: the fact that a number of suspects could be implicated and charged for a single homicide, and face various charges, you are all ready to have your "notes" be put into a database. And now that it's in a database, it's just a weekend of hacking to make a homicides website or a map.
- mark-r 14y agoSo I hope that non-scrolling headers make it into an early version.
- tiziano88 14y agosounds like you would benefit from using org-mode!
- danso 14y agoAt first I thought you were being snarky and that was some inside joke...but looks like a cool tool, thanks! http://orgmode.org/ http://orgmode.org/ The one advantage of spreadsheets is that most people know how to work with them. And with Google Docs, you get easy collaborative note-taking, plus some of the fancier features and effects (I find color-formatting empty/filled cells to be useful)
- FreshCode 14y agoThis is great. Please enlarge your feature-copy font to 16px and set line-height to 1.62em so I can read it :).
- newman314 14y agoIn all honesty, I'm not sure how useful this will be for me. I deal with spreadsheets many columns wide and a big screen is what helps. Rather, I would love to see someone work on being able to seamlessly hook up various data sources in the background to Excel so that I can still use Excel as the UI while having a proper db in the background.
- sandstrom 14y agoGiven the usage of spreadsheets in companies (humongous) and how much room there is for improvements to certain aspects of Excel (better scripting is one thing that comes to mind) I think this has great potential.
- jey 14y agoHow is it that they can allow scripting in Lua? Doesn't the iOS SDK ToS forbid interpreters other than JavaScriptCore?
- josho 14y agoAt one point in time the TOS prohibited custom script engines like Lau. But, Apple (likely to cater to some of the large game companies on iOS) eased back that restriction 1 or 2 years ago. I believe that downloading scripts/code and allowing users to enter scripts may still prohibited.
- eridius 14y agoUsers can enter scripts. And I believe you can even transfer scripts using the iTunes file transfer functionality. You just can't download them over the internet.
- podperson 14y agoThe problem is executing scripts from elsewhere. Take a look at Codea -- lets you develop Lua apps (game focus) entirely on the iPad and, when you're done, provides an open source harness for creating an App Store app. What you can't do is load a Codea project from some random place online and just run it directly in Codea. (You can post code on a website and Codea folk can copy and paste it.)
- jwr 14y agoYour page does very little to convince me to buy the app. Think about it this way: most customers who will consider your app have already bought Numbers. So how is your app better than Numbers? Lua scripting sounds good, but it might not be enough. As for the rest of the page, your screenshots tell me very little about the app capabilities, while the "feature" descriptions are overly vague. I will likely buy the app just hoping that it will work better (and faster) than Numbers, but I am not convinced - it feels like a die toss. I am probably your target customer, so you might want to consider this.
- vicm 14y agoI tend to use Numbers and iCloud all the time, because of the sync between desktop, iphone and ipad. The iphone might not be ideal, but I love that I can get at a spreadsheet easily when I'm mobile, and I don't always carry my ipad. For me I wouldn't consider switching from Numbers without cross platform (desktop/phone/tablet) availability of my data.
- zachwill 14y agoThe ability to script with Lua is incredibly smart.
- RBerenguel 14y agoiOS6... The time to upgrade my iPad 1 to a newer model is getting closer by the minute
- rubyrescue 14y agoThere's also a YC tablet spreadsheet startup out there - GRID.
- eridius 14y agoThis looks very cool. My big worry is the only place I'll be able to get at my spreadsheet is on my iPad. Being able to sync with spreadsheets on Google Drive would be a fantastic step towards interoperability with other people/software.
- mjhea0 14y agoLet's face it, if you're going to create a new spreadsheet, it must have the ability to port over to Google and Excel. Otherwise, you just have another data silo.
- zavulon 14y agoI've opened the site, searched for Dropbox, didn't find it, and closed tab. Sorry for harsh feedback, and feel free to disregard it if Dropbox users are not a significant portion of your target market.
- lucian1900 14y agoIt's very sad that Apple have neutered iOS so it can't even have apps decoupled from the storage of the files they operate on.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- kcl 14y agoWe'll be launching Dropbox support soon. Hope you'll come back to us then.
- 3rd3 14y agoSpeaking of it: Support for WebDAV, SFTP, box.net, SkyDrive, SugarSync, AFP and SMB would be great too! (In this order.) Otherwise a proper scripting language in a spreadsheet app on my iPad seems very promising. It would be also great if one could search public scripts of other users.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- chrisdevereux 14y agoSomething that may require some thought if you want to do this is how you handle import/export of documents with embedded scripts. You'll need to be very careful not to fall to the "applications that download additional code" rule there. This happened to Codea (http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/Talk/discussion/comment/14504#Comment_14504 http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/Talk/discussion/comment/14504#...), and afaik they still haven't managed to get their project sharing feature re-approved.
- julianz 14y agoI'd love to play with a powerful Lua-enabled spreadsheet on the iPad, but the pricing is miles off. It's NZD 13.99, the same as the Apple productivity apps and Photoshop, but that price is apparently a 50% discount and the app looks a long way from finished. At NZD 4.99 I'd buy it and start playing without thinking twice.
- jorgeleo 14y agoFor 9.99 introductory price I think is awesome. 3 questions: 1. With the Lua script, can I call a web service or a web page to get an xml or or a json with data and load that response directly to a sheet? 2. How do I put a button or something to trigger a script? 3. Can I open one of your files from a web link? as in "Open in..." With those 3 items I have a server controlled reporting app.
- csomar 14y agoLooks good. If you are interest in getting it reviewed in iPad.appstorm send me an email with a coupon code.
- martinced 14y agoAmazing. First all the semi-recent talks about Excel really being the one thing making the real-world work at all (not Linux, not OS X, not Google, no... Excel was the word)... Then now that people are showing other spreadsheets suddenly we can hear the whiners: "But I need my Excel shortcuts" and "But I need my wide-screen to show all my Excel colums". I'm pretty sure that should we live one day in a world dominated by iOS / Android and online HTML5 / iOS / Android / Google Docs spreadsheets (we're already kinda are in that one in the SMEs world that said), we'd still hear the cries of a few corporate drones (or MS astroturfers) telling us that Excel is the one and only spreadsheet preventing the planet from imploding.
- bsg75 14y agoGive me a desktop version, so that sheets and scripts can be shared and I am sold.