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Comment by jawns | Hacker News Reader

My take: If your app needs to update and preserve state (using SQLite or any other DB), it is probably not something you want to pass around as a bundled file.

Or at least, it's extremely limiting, compared with hosting it somewhere on the web, which is not that hard to do these days.

Think of the workflow: Any time the state changes, you need to email a new Capsule file to whoever else is using the app. And one would think the state would change at least occasionally, because otherwise there's little reason to use a DB.

Alternatively, you can just host it on the web, the DB state dynamically updates, and it's automatically available to anyone with app access. Isn't that a lot simpler?

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> Isn't that a lot simpler?

You’re glossing over the recurring cost and annoyance of dealing with the hosting and having to secure the data. This way you just share and it’s local.

Sure, if you have to share data between people, your points are valid. But this seems like a way to build apps geared for individual users, like a notes or recipes app.

For most users having to mail a file to someone is way more work than having to just share a link. The cost of cloud storage is almost nothing (since email is mentioned I assume 50MB max per project). A notes app that don't sync between all devices is just a text editor to most.

I do like apps that have sensible export formats though. Having control over my data is important.

> For most users having to mail a file to someone is way more work than having to just share a link.

Citation very much needed. Sharing a link, especially if you’re already at your computer where the app runs, very often means emailing the link.

> The cost of cloud storage is almost nothing

“Almost nothing” is not nothing. I really wished we stopped with this idea of “I can afford it, so everyone can too”. And you’re summarily ignoring the very important point of the annoyance (especially for someone inexperienced) and security aspects, which are huge.

> A notes app that don't sync between all devices is just a text editor to most.

Maybe for you. I recommend you observe more regular people.

Also, that is a single example, not representative of the whole.

Or the copies can go their own way. I could send someone an itinerary and they could change the dates or drop half the stops and add their own notes without needing to send an updated copy. Getting them to install another app just to open it might be a problem, especially if they only want to use it once.

In a corporate context it's basically impossible for employees to host an app anywhere. So an app that works entirely locally and you can send to colleagues sounds useful.

theres still lots of programs where local is the main user. but as time goes on the user may want to portably move it just by emailing the file itself. i made like a very light clone of notepad++ using it for my macbook. as a side note: i think they missed an opportunity to call it .pdfv rather than .capsule

> hosting it somewhere on the web, which is not that hard to do these days.

Tell any non-tech person that.

A non-tech person could handle this: https://app.netlify.com/drop

I asked mum. I'm not going to type in what she said, otherwise my comment will get flagged.

Why not on a shared drive like dropbox?

Concurrent editing wouldn't work, though.

Beyond "not working", concurrent editing is likely to silently lose data, or corrupt data, or possibly just fill up your drive with lots of "conflicted copies" that you have to manually reconcile.

When I read about this project, it doesn’t seem like concurrency is much of a concern. I think it’s _supposed_ to be treated like sharing a document with someone else.

If a capsule is a recipe, like in one of the examples, that’s pretty cool. If a capsule is a recipe _manager_, then I think it would get messy.

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