Ragic – Editable forms with relational data | Hacker News Reader

Ragic – Editable forms with relational data

ragic.com

94 pointsrefik37 comments

I would really like to see a good tool in the "beyond Google Sheets"-space.

I tried Ragic just now for 10-15 minutes and it is far from simple, like their landing page claims. It is nothing at all like a database and it also is nothing at all like a spreadsheet (and not in a good way).

Edit: Looking at previous discussions about it here on HN, the criticism in this 5 year old comment all still holds true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960207

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.

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!

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

Thanks for the feedback!

Airtable looks like exactly what the world needs for a modern system to let everyday users manage data well rather than bunging it all in a spreadsheet.

But the row limits are too low for many obvious uses. I assume this is for technical reasons? Otherwise it doesn't make much sense that if you pay for 20 users to share a database you get the same number of rows as if you pay for two.

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

Thanks for all the feedback! These are all things that we're considering : ). In particular #1 is actually in private beta right now!

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

Ironically, we used Airtable + Zapier as our core backend when we launched Nugget... It worked great!

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/

So, applicable name then?

AirTable.com is a really great tool in this space - simple and works well

Fieldbook is also an alternative. https://fieldbook.com

Can anyone please suggest an OSS variant in this space? I would kill to use something like this, but for my use case has to be OSS.

> "Over 90% of enterprise IT projects are delivered late."

Due to piss poor project managers and lack of business requirements and/or realistic deadlines.

Mmm, I've worked (as a developer) with a lot of shitty developers responsible for project death through incompetence.

Lateness is a mostly meaningless metric. On the one hand, it's vague, and on the other hand, it has little inherent value. Doubly meaningless.

For example, let's say a team is given 4 projects. They provide rough effort estimates and schedule those projects on the calendar, with normal buffer for support issues, changes, etc. Then a new ultra-high-priority, life-of-the-company-at-stake project comes down from the CEO, and everything else gets pushed back by months.

So, are those original 4 projects technically late? By many studies' definitions, they would be categorized late.

Furthermore, does it matter if they are late? If you're late on 80% of your projects but deliver on time for 100% of your critical projects, is that so bad?

Not having the demo ready for the tradeshow is a real problem. Not having the compliance changes in by the deadline is a real problem. Not having the integration upgrade done before your partner turns off the old version is a real problem. And so on. Missing some date that was arbitrarily chosen, probably months or years ago, eh, that doesn't necessarily bother me.

I'm not arguing that it's good to be late. It's obviously better for projects to be delivered when expected to let businesses make projections, plan, etc. I'm just saying the real world is messy and full of tradeoffs. If you're constantly reacting to fires and unexpectedly missing deadlines, that's a sign that better project management is needed. However, if you're working with business stakeholders to reprioritize efforts and adapt to changing realities, that can be good in my opinion – even though externally it can appear that projects are "late".

Edit: To be clear, I'm not really agreeing or disagreeing with parent's comment on the source of lateness. I'm commenting on using stats like these as evidence that something is broken in software development.

This particular application has name called database application builder (DAB). I think that's probably how DabbleDB got its name. Also checkout out Caspio (http://caspio.com) and ZenBase (http://getzenbase.com). They are similar products in this space.

Huh. No, for the record, we'd never heard that acronym when we chose the name for Dabble DB.

We have been running Flexlists.com[0] for many years as a 'background sideproject'. Not to make money; it was to scratch an itch and I still use it a lot. We launch somewhere before DabbleDB I think and some others and they all folded so we never took it further. Ours is trivially simple to use which I do not find the case with others. The interface is somewhat dated and the source code has only been updated for security in the recent 5 years. I am going to continue with it soon as I do believe there is something and Flexlists has enough users and fans. Good to see people are still working in this space.

[0] http://flexlists.com

DabbleDB anyone? One of those products that really should have been more successful.

A bit off topic: their landing page is really very well done. My only picking is their name: Ragic!.. Simpler software doesn't have to sound unprofessional.

Isn't this basically the same as MS Access?

Your pricing page is not mobile-friendly.

Is this like dabbledb?

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.

Fwiw Airtable has often been compared with DabbleDB :).

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

This seems to serve the same purpose as, e.g., Access. What is different about this?

1) Your data is in the cloud, you do have do worry about controlling it yourself.

2) There is no perpetual license to worry about, only pay as long as you need your data.

3) Access allowed business people to muddle through creating database that IT hated to have to maintain... this is obviously different.

Access on a Mac or mobile isn't there

It's always nice to see tools tackling the everyday challenges of allowing the non-programmer to solve his problems instead of hot air duds like LightTable and Eve that try to create some revolutionary paradigm that is unfamiliar to both programmers and non-programmers.

Many updates, new features and a redesign? Seems very nice.

How is this better than Filemaker Pro?

HTTP only sign up page? really? in 2017?

Top sign-up link is https, but you're correct that it's possible to load it as http and the sign-up in the body of the page links to the http version.

They need to redirect any http to https for the sign-up page; they already do this for the login page.

More like tRagic based on the comments here.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com