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howsta commented on Microsoft announces Lists, a new Airtable-like app   techcommunity.microsoft.c... · Posted by u/lxm
andrewstuart · 5 years ago
I wonder if the developers/designers are aware of the common ancestry with Lotus Notes.

I suspect not because it looks like the founders are too young to have even used Notes - my guess is this is a clean reinvention.

howsta · 5 years ago
Founder of Airtable here--we did look at Lotus Notes as an interesting historical precedent, though of course we've also invented from scratch in many cases, and being web-based and collaborative by default is a huge wedge for us in terms of adoption virality. I admit I'm too young to have used Lotus Notes but we did buy an old Lotus Notes guidebook, as well as looked up old Infoworld and other magazine articles (Google Books indexes those magazines!) about Notes, dBase, and other products in the genre : ).
howsta commented on Ask HN: How to build a personal database for creative work    · Posted by u/sprafa
howsta · 8 years ago
Cofounder of Airtable here. Video production is a common use case for us! Here's some relevant community-generated templates: https://airtable.com/universe/category/creative-production
howsta · 8 years ago
Also this page links to some in-depth case studies about how it's used: https://airtable.com?try=videoproduction
howsta commented on Ask HN: How to build a personal database for creative work    · Posted by u/sprafa
sprafa · 8 years ago
Wow! This just blew me away. Very VERY close to what I was thinking. Going to try this now.
howsta · 8 years ago
Cofounder of Airtable here. Video production is a common use case for us! Here's some relevant community-generated templates: https://airtable.com/universe/category/creative-production
howsta commented on Ragic – Editable forms with relational data   ragic.com... · Posted by u/refik
refik · 9 years ago
Things that I would like to see in Airtable:

1) Being able to link tables in different bases https://community.airtable.com/t/link-to-other-base/107/112

2) Being able to create linked records from form view

howsta · 9 years ago
Thanks for the feedback!
howsta commented on Ragic – Editable forms with relational data   ragic.com... · Posted by u/refik
snaily · 9 years ago
Quick feature requests:

1) Foreign keys to users (for e.g. "assigned to", "team members")

2) Better programmability - right now, anything moderately complex requires a bunch of intermediate column (that then have to be hidden from all views). Objective spreadsheets (MIT SAIL) seems like something to aim for.

3) Programmatic (API) access to row history - at least read, for reports

howsta · 9 years ago
Thanks for all the feedback! These are all things that we're considering : ). In particular #1 is actually in private beta right now!
howsta commented on Ragic – Editable forms with relational data   ragic.com... · Posted by u/refik
jpster · 9 years ago
Thank you for Airtable, I'm a big fan, especially of the Zapier integration. Lately there has been a lot of discussion on Hacker News about projects like Opps Daily [1] and Nugget [2], where people write in about some pain point they have in their daily job that might be solved by custom-built software. I get the impression that Airtable + Zapier could solve a lot of those use cases.

-- [1] http://oppsdaily.com/ [2] https://nugget.one/daily

howsta · 9 years ago
Thanks for the kind words! We love Zapier and use it extensively ourselves : ). Here's some example workflows Zapier wrote about: https://zapier.com/blog/airtable-automations/https://zapier.com/blog/how-zapier-uses-airtable/
howsta commented on Ragic – Editable forms with relational data   ragic.com... · Posted by u/refik
derefr · 9 years ago
Exactly what I was going to compare this to. And I hope it is—DabbleDB was excellent. This looks like it has more interoperation features (Excel synchronization) but maybe doesn't have the auto-guessed column-types + relations that DabbleDB had.
howsta · 9 years ago
Fwiw Airtable has often been compared with DabbleDB :).

https://mobile.twitter.com/patrickc/status/51568968982347366...

howsta commented on Ragic – Editable forms with relational data   ragic.com... · Posted by u/refik
kornish · 9 years ago
Not sure what you mean by "beyond Google Sheets" space, but there have been some cool spreadsheet tools emerging recently.

http://www.alphasheets.com/ is still mostly in stealth (as far as I can tell) but they let you mix and match SQL, Python, R, and Excel formulae in a spreadsheet.

Airtable seems pretty polished (https://airtable.com/).

Both of these are definitely spreadsheets, though. Not sure if you're looking for something more specialized for a certain vertical or problem domain.

howsta · 9 years ago
Founder of Airtable here--Airtable is actually a relational database with foreign key relationships (the technicalities of which are abstracted away from the user). It's designed specifically to be somewhere between the accessibility of a spreadsheet and the customizability/structure of a Filemaker/Access/Force.com, all with a much more modern UX and collaboration experience. Airtable.com/product or Airtable.com/templates offers some more context!
howsta commented on Google Spreadsheets and Python   twilio.com/blog/2017/02/a... · Posted by u/happy-go-lucky
phillc73 · 9 years ago
Could you spend a couple of minutes to describe the advantages of Airtable over Fieldbook or Ragic? I've been gripped by indecision regarding which tool to use, and hence use none of them.
howsta · 9 years ago
To be honest, I haven't spent a lot of time using Fieldbook or Ragic. That being said, we spend an insane amount of time/effort making sure that Airtable delivers a first-class product experience. In fact, the first couple years of Airtable's existence involved myself and my cofounder Andrew--who previously PMed the redesign of Google Maps--building countless prototype variants to get the UX right, doing a literal hundred user studies with people from all sorts of industries/roles to understand how the full range of how they used spreadsheets, databases, and other products, and researching the prior art by talking to the creators of past products in the space (i.e. MS Access, Excel, Coghead, Podio, Dabbledb, etc).

We think Airtable is to spreadsheets/Access/Filemaker what Slack is to email (and fwiw, Slack itself uses Airtable http://bit.ly/2m58l4U ).

Specifically, our product offers the following (which to my knowledge Ragic/Fieldbook do not): x IMO a much more intuitive design x Native Android, iPhone, & iPad apps, as well as an electron desktop app ( airtable.com/downloads ) x Ability to create multiple views on the same table, each of which preserves its own filter/sort/visibility settings Multiple view types, including grid, grouped records, calendar, kanban, public forms, and gallery: http://bit.ly/2ky3WLB . x Inline collaboration i.e. @mentions in text fields, record-level comments x Many more useful field types x Visual revision history and snapshots x More integrations, such as with Zapier (see Zapier's writeups http://bit.ly/2lfGr79 http://bit.ly/2l3dZqG ), Slack, native calendars via an iCal feed, and Dropbox/Box/Gdrive/Evernote. x Greater capacity and smoother performance. x Full realtime sync for all changes, including schema modifications. x Lots of little things, like the ability to perform date calculations relative to today (i.e. a filtered view or formula that shows all projects due within 7 days from today and is automatically updated as time goes by), private share-links and embeds to give people access to a read-only view of Airtable without making them sign up for an account, inline document previews (e.g. view a text-copyable inline version of a .DOCX file)

Over 30,000 organizations already use Airtable--this includes tech cos like Airbnb, Box, Wework, and Tesla; non-tech cos like Atlantic Records and Penguin Randomhouse; educational institutions like CMU, Rice, and Stanford. We're growing our team and continuously releasing new enhancements to improve the product experience for all users.

howsta commented on Google Spreadsheets and Python   twilio.com/blog/2017/02/a... · Posted by u/happy-go-lucky
vijayr · 9 years ago
Is there a downloadable version of this, paid or free?
howsta · 9 years ago
In addition to native mobile apps, we do have a desktop app. It does require internet connectivity though (similar to Slack's app, it's built on electron). Airtable.com/downloads

u/howsta

KarmaCake day436September 15, 2009
About
Founder of Airtable. Previously Etacts (YC w2010), products @ Salesforce. Reach me at howie [AT] airtable.com
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