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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

Is there a place these days for interfaces like this? I’m thinking about self contained applications like HyperCard stacks, but also FileMaker databases or even Access databases where we had interfaces linked to a database all as a self contained application. These tools with scripting languages powered a ton of small business applications. I know a lab I worked with was still using FileMaker databases up until a few years ago. These were user developed applications, done by people who may have been a bit technical, but who didn’t to know a full programming language.

If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use? Is there a default now? Notion?

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I've seen people (non IT) do similar things (i.e. develop small applications) with Excel.

I created my bibliographic database with HyperCard. And I still miss it. HyperCard's attractiveness was the easy UI creation. FileMaker wasn't bad, but a bit more limited UI wise. And sqlite, while a phantastic DB misses the easy UI.

In the past, we used to refer to these as 4GL systems [1] - and as far as I'm concerned, this is really a wide open field for innovation - especially in the era of AI/LLMs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth-generation_programming_...

I don't think anyone you're calling a "shop" would do anything business-critical with it, but fwiw, Tiddlywiki fits in this category.

https://tiddlywiki.com/

Why past tense, Filemaker and Access are still being sold.

A solution would probably be Airtable.

It’s more that I haven’t really seen many examples of Access or FileMaker applications in the wild for a while. Most of these were CRUD apps that were able to be moved to the web. But that doesn’t mean that typical users are any more capable of navigating hosting setups for modern CRUD web apps.

The FileMaker example I saw was really for a legacy shop that was primarily used for existing applications. Nothing new was being added.

But I’m sure there are more examples in the wild than I would have seen. I was curious what the larger HN community has seen or has experience with.

I mean, for me, I’d probably put something in a SQLite database and build a simple web GUI on top of it. But I know that’s an option. What does a typical office worker do these days? Put everything in Excel? (That’s probably the answer)

Well thats the crux. While the display may seem simple (a grid, a few controls), a Web UI CRUD app, while routine today, is NOT simple.

While it's been 20+ years since I dealt with either, you can create table, get a navigable (and perhaps other features), and a CRUD detail screen in just a few minutes of drag and drop.

And it's right there, on your machine, no cognitive load about, well, anything, and ready to go. Another 10 minutes and you have a printable report spewing out on your laser printer.

It's quite a first step to go beyond the wizard based stuff into BASIC and such, but the fundamentals are there. And the fundamentals are useful out of the box.

You can set up a usable Access DB and MS Word Mail Merge in probably 1/2 hour of reading some tutorials.

Finally, out of the box, the screens look "ok". Your collection of fields conveniently fill the window nicely. You don't have a 21" x 12" white, barren canvas with Name, Address, C/S/Z and two buttons crammed up in the upper left corner. "Gee why is the font so small?" So now you don't have to fall down the rabbit hole to try and make your simple form even baseline "presentable".

It is curious that MS (afaik) does not have a way to drag and drop an Access application and have it "deploy" to the web, and (afaik), Access isn't part of Office 365 either.

Access is included with Microsoft 365, even personal, but there is no web version.

Microsoft rather pushes PowerApps for the same use cases, when targeting the web.

FileMaker is no longer affordable. A single seat is around $500.

Suggested retail price for Filemaker when it was originally released in 1985 for Macintosh was $195. That's about $600 these days.

It is about as expensive as it ever was.

Which is fair, if FileMaker existed in a vacuum. The inflation-adjusted cost of software and hardware has consistently trended downwards over the past 40 years.

As someone that pays for commercial software, only if you are talking about race to the bottom on mobile stores.

A proper PC or Apple device, proper being the keyword, not throwaway gear under 500 €, is as expensive as always, when buying hardware with 5 to 10 years expected lifetime in a professional setting.

In terms of software, commercial quality software is now often free and/or open source. Maybe the best application software is still expensive, but free software is better than anything that existed a two decades ago let alone four decades. The only people deploying Windows Server these days are doing so for legacy reasons, not by choice.

In terms of hardware, a Macintosh Plus vs a MacBook Neo. The latter is many orders of magnitude superior in any metric you could possibly imagine, and it's 1/10th the price in real dollars. Even if you insist on a "serious" laptop it's still 1/4th the price.

  Year Example                  Price   Real 2026
  ---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
  1986 Compaq Portable II (286)  $3,500   $10,700
  1996 Dell/Gateway Pentium 166  $2,500    $5,300
  2006 Dell XPS (Core 2 Duo)     $2,200    $3,650
  2016 Dell XPS 15               $1,500    $2,100
  2026 Dell XPS 14/16            $2,000    $2,000

  Year Example                  Price   Real 2026
  ---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
  1986 Macintosh Plus            $2,599    $7,900
  1996 Power Macintosh 7200      $2,000    $4,300
  2006 20" iMac                  $1,699    $2,800
  2016 13" MacBook Pro           $1,699    $2,360
  2026 14" MacBook Pro (M5)      $1,999    $2,000

  Year Example                  Price   Real 2026
  ---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
  1986 Novell NetWare            $3,000    $9,100
  1996 Windows NT Server 4.0     $1,100    $2,400
  2006 Windows Server 2003       $1,000    $1,660
  2016 Windows Server 2016         $900    $1,250
  2026 Linux                         $0        $0

  Year Example                  Price   Real 2026
  ---- ----------------------- -------- ----------
  1986 Early pro NLE systems    $50,000  $152,000
  1996 Adobe Premiere 4.2          $800    $1,700
  2006 Final Cut Pro             $1,000    $1,660
  2016 Final Cut Pro X             $300      $420
  2026 Da Vinci Resolve              $0        $0

And all of these tables are actually unfair because the newer stuff is way, way, way, way better than any of the older stuff. If we were being fair, the old computers should be absolute top-of-the-line models and the 2016/2026 models should be a Raspberry Pi.

A Macintosh Plus was only affordable under university student discounts in Portugal, and hardly seen anywhere.

MacBook Neo is a nothing to talk about with its 8 GB and phone motherboard, I specifically mentioned "A proper PC or Apple device, proper being the keyword, not throwaway gear under 500 €, is as expensive as always, when buying hardware with 5 to 10 years expected lifetime in a professional setting."

Neo isn't such device, my current hardware has 32 GB.

Your examples miss the relation of salaries, life cost and related percentage to hardware prices, per country.

> A Macintosh Plus was only affordable ...

Exactly my point. Thank you. Computers are so much more affordable now. The remainder of your post seems to be about me mentioning the Neo as an extreme case despite me ultimately ceding to your arbitrary criteria and selecting the M5 MacBook Pro as the point of comparison.

Again, comparing it to a Mac Plus or a 286, or a Pentium 166. Are we even being serious here?

> Neo isn't such device

Absolutely it is, and then some. You're just spoiled by your fancy 32 GB computer because — again, proving my point about affordability — computers are incredibly cheap now and they keep getting cheaper in real terms.

Calling the Neo "throwaway" is an incredibly privileged take. There's no reason to expect it won't have a comparable lifespan to any of the computers listed. It has a fantastic keyboard, comparable to the best laptop keyboards. If you don't agree, that's probably because you don't like laptop keyboards. So don't get a laptop.

You did have one valid point though, the Neo does have a small motherboard. That's unforgivable.

Not everyone enjoys FAANG salaries....

Sure. Oracle APEX is popular. You never hear about it on HN because the target user base for low code stuff doesn't overlap with the HN set much, but it's huge.

https://blogs.oracle.com/apex/organizations-ww-chose-apex

In that IDC survey it's the most popular low code product, over 2 million apps and half a million developers.

There's a SaaS version at apex.oracle.com with a free tier if you want to try it, and you can self-host it as well.

That’s what I’m looking for - low code environments for making quick applications that aren’t sexy, but that are genuinely helpful for a non-technical business. Thanks!

From that link, it seems that Salesforce and Microsoft also have offerings. That doesn’t surprise me at all. I’ve seen a bit of MS PowerApps, but generally discounted it as I thought that app should have been a proper DB. Now I’m thinking that I may have been a bit hasty.

> If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use?

There's a zillion of under/over-developed solutions. Too much fragmentation for something to get enough traction to reach critical mass? Tricky space.

SaaS seems to have largely replaced them. And, needless to say, now LLM.

an llm coding agent?

SQLite seems to me like it fits the bill.

SQLite doesn’t have a built-in user interface. The value of something like FileMaker isn’t the underlying storage mechanism, it’s the WYSIWYG user interface building that lets you quickly build custom apps around it

(sigh) I was replying to:

>"If you’re a small shop and have a need for a little database, what do you use?"

not the rest of the comment. mea culpa for not quoting that specific Q.

Edit: as for the rest of it, I love using Obsidian for ~everything. It's not a database, but it does support queries and rendering of tabular data, which meets all my admittedly modest needs.

(if a true db is required, some ppl like logseq which has some feature overlap w obsidian but is db-driven)

Historically the kind of shop that wants a FileMaker/Access replacement does not really want to develop software from scratch. I guess vibe coding may change that equation these days

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