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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

This is actually pretty cool, one step closer to making Google Docs a worthy competitor to Office. If they combine this with an Access-type database app, it could be a great tool for businesses.

Although using the interface builder brings back memories of VB...

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The UI designer from old-school VB the best part about it. Obviously, the language part was crap. I think that forms designer still represents a rapid UI development environment that many languages/environments have not reached.

Probably not a very popular opinion here on HN, but the raw productivity you can achieve in the VBA/Office world is hard to reach anywhere else.

That still mostly exists in Visual Studio. I'm writing C# right now and the good old toolbox is right there on the left. Now it has even more goodies thanks to the .NET framework.

I typically do more webapps than anything else, so I have gotten used to designing my own UIs from scratch. I don't mind as it helps keep things very lean... but I'd love to use something like Sencha's app designer thing. I just can't justify the cost currently.

I always thought Trolltech's Qt Designer was much better.

Evidently, you could smell a VB product a mile away because of the awkward widget positionings in the window and the usually-not-resizable aspect.

You had to write manual resize code for all window components in VB, whereas in Qt it was all automatic.

Thinking about Google Docs simply as an Office competitor is wrong. If you come to it expecting to do everything you do in Office, it is probably adequate but definitely much worse. However, Docs can do sharing of centralized data, use web APIs, integrate with your mail, and more - things Office can't even hope to match.

> Access-type database app

I think that's the idea of Fusion Tables [1]. Since there is an API, I don't see why you couldn't combine it with Apps Script (what this editor is), if you wanted to. I don't think tight integration is there yet but the pieces seem to be in place. I think they just need to allow a script to be invoked from a Table.

1. http://www.google.com/fusiontables

I think the interface builder resembles more interfaces builders for Java than Visual Basic and Delphi ones...

And that's good IMHO

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