howsta

Thanks for the feedback! Good points - will add these to our queue for features

Thanks for letting us know, will look into it now

Hi, good point--we have a template gallery that shows the "why" use cases https://airtable.com/templates

And also are building out a few dedicated pages for the most common use cases like the job applicant tracking one you described: https://airtable.com/applicantTracking/a3sz9t7b

Hi, yes it is, sorry for confusion! It's fixed now on https://airtable.com/pricing

Thanks! We use node on the backend, and have our own realtime database engine that supports relational data, and out-of-order undo. We also have a custom frontend framework that consumes the realtime changes pushed from all other clients.

See more in my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374468

We have a custom frontend framework that supports realtime data synchronization. We use some pieces of other frameworks, like Backbone's routing and events library. Andrew Ofstad (@aofstad) is our design lead, and created the aesthetic framework (he previously lead the Maps redesign at Google).

First off, we're huge fans of both Meteor and Asana. I spoke with Geoff @ Meteor a couple years ago when we were first starting to build out the Airtable product and was very impressed by their approach and vision.

We've closely followed the developer blogs of both those projects (and in Meteor's case, their source code). With those learnings, we built our own realtime database engine that supports relational data (which Meteor doesn't yet support) and also some other major features like the ability to undo any user action out of order (like git revert), which is necessary to support undo in a multi-user context (because the last thing that you did may not be the last change globally if other people are concurrently making changes). Undo is a particularly challenging feature to implement in a structured relational database context, because it can't be reduced to a set of simplistic character insertion operations as is the case for a google word doc, or a spreadsheet (which is a simple 2d array of values without type constraints, foreign key relations, etc).

Couldn't find your email listed (PS your site ashkenas.com seems to be down right now). Can you email me at howie @ airtable.com?

You can reach me at howie @ airtable.com It's fixed now if you try again

We're going to release an API in the near future ( https://airtable.com/api ), but that would be used for server-side integrations (ie you must deploy your own server to host your own code talk to Airtable's servers).

We do want to support some form of scripting that would be hosted on OUR servers, but that's further out on the roadmap. We also have plans to support external integrations and triggers via Zapier/IFTTT.

Hi Kolev! We do have plans to release an API (by end of this year or early next). If you're interested in getting early access and providing feedback on the features you would need, please fill out this form: https://getforma.wufoo.com/forms/q1ijurhh1cp2kfu/ Or, reach out to me directly at howie@airtable.com

Hi, the biggest differences between us and Bento/Filemaker/MSAccess (and even older products like Ashton Tate's dBase, Lotus Approach, etc) are:

1) Airtable is seamlessly realtime and instantly shareable with collaborators (which we believe is highly important for most use cases).

All those other products required desktop software installation, and sharing a DB with multiple users required involved setting up a networked shared drive with a file that was concurrently accessed by multiple users.

2) Airtable supports a full fledged mobile, simple-to-use interface. Mobile access is increasingly important, and none of those products provided a mobile interface (with the exception of Bento). Our mobile app instantly syncs all your changes with the web interface, or other shared collaborators.

3) Airtable supports the speed of data entry of a grid based interface on the web, while maintaining database structure (typed columns, 1 row = 1 record) which means we can alternately display records as cards (on mobile) or in the future, points on a map, events on a calendar, etc. Many of the other products forced you to use a form-based interface for record creation/editing, rather than allowing grid-based editing.

4) More modern paradigm. We support features like @mentions, row comments, direct file uploads from dropbox/box/google drive, etc, that add a useful collaboration layer on top of just the raw data.

If you click through the link in this HN post ( https://airtable.com/invite/a3sz9t7b ) it has an invite code embedded in the URL. Once you're signed in, if you visit airtable.com/templates you will be able to browse through and directly add a template to your workspace. You can also visit airtable.com/templates without an invite code and browse (but not add)

Thanks very much! Re: API, yes absolutely. Our web and mobile apps already use an internal API that uses RESTful JSON routes for reading tables, updating rows, etc. If you want to chat more about it or discuss the specifics of what you need from the API, you can reach me directly at howie@airtable.com

Thanks for checking it out! Yes, an Android app is on the roadmap for the near future. Thanks for the heads up, will fix the typo in the next deploy. If you want some inspiration for uses cases, we do have a template gallery here: https://airtable.com/templates

FYI, we require that you oauth in via a Google account purely for authentication right now. We don't request permissions for your email, calendar, contacts, or other data--only your name, email, and profile picture (which is used in the UI). We're working on support for email/password based signup, as well as oauth support for other services.

Amen to that. The power of Node is this language style already makes tons of sense to experienced front-end developers who deal with async flow for everything they do.

lol I was afraid I had just clicked on a hentai link at first.

Hey swombat (super-wombat?) You can set reminders on any of your contacts in our interface (in fact, you can sort by days since contact to find people that you've lost touch with).

It also includes people you used to email a lot but have forgotten about recently.

Howie

Just curious, why do you use Apple Mail instead of Gmail (with offline) or even Mailplane?

We have a Firefox extension and bookmarklets for other browsers....?

nice

Thanks for the feedback. 1) Login button text is fixed. 2) Sorry, having some delays from too many users trying to sign up. We're working on speeding up the import process now. Sorry for the delay!

Also Harj's email isn't his real one. The one on the front page is harj@default.net (which is fake)

IMHO a lot of tasks that they talked about seem to be be repetitive, large-scale tasks that already can be broken into small pieces. For instance the sentiment analysis demo (each tweet is a task) or image moderation (each image is a task).