Here's one use case: i tried importing a 500+ row wine spreadsheet into it (it has columns like type, producer, name, vintage, rating, source etc).
I had to save the file as CSV and import it -- or at least that's what I thought, but filepicker seems to support picking from google drive. I don't know if it would have accepted a spreadsheet.
Your app seems sluggish to scroll compared to Google Docs at that size, and the record density seems low (I see 29 records per page vs 50 on Google Docs). This is using Chrome 38 on Linux.
The "link to another table" seems interesting, but my data came denormalized so I have a column with e.g. 10 different repeated values on 500 rows. Maybe it would be nice to automatically clean that up somehow. For example, I could Copy the column and have a some Paste (unique values only) option. Maybe the dialogue that comes up (suggesting to expand the spreadsheet) could even tell you about that. Or maybe there could be an option to convert a text field to a separated linked table.
I had some conditional formatting set up via Google Docs, which could be nice to have here; e.g. red wines have a red background in that wine type table.
I don't have a simple primary key -- it's really a composite of {wine producer, wine name, vintage}. The app didn't mind importing non-unique values into that first column. I don't know what the alternative might have been -- an auto-generated primary key?
Having said all of the above, I really like Google Docs and it will take some amazing features to make me switch to anything else. Multi-user planning and documentation via docs is great -- I have a shopping list everyone can update and I can see it change real time on the phone in the shop while someone is changing it from their desktop, and it's always up to date.
Thanks a lot for your feedback, these are definitely things we're looking to tackle.
We're planning on improving scrolling performance soon, it's definitely a priority for us to improve our performance for large datasets.
As for the linking, we definitely want to do more to help you normalize your data. We can also infer column types to help with the import process. Doing this type of thing on paste is an interesting idea.
We have some ideas for how to make it so that you don't need a primary column. One thing that you can do now is make the primary column a formula, and then reference other columns to generate a key.
If you're interested in talking about the challenges of creating a performant spreadsheet, I've built a javascript-based spreadsheet backed by a database that's more performant than Google Docs/any open source table available on the internet. I'd be happy to share the techniques.
This looks like a nice product. Software companies have been struggling to make a mass-market database program ever since Lotus 1-2-3 (the "3" was a database), but the spreadsheet remains king, despite the fact that for storing structured data, it is almost as bad as a Word document with macros. So I'll be rooting for you.
One complaint: Referring to your Basic plan as being "Free forever" is a bit disingenuous. In my opinion, the FTC ought to prohibit use of this term by tech companies located in the 650 and 415 area codes.
I'm not sure if the "forever" keyword was ever involved, but two examples that spring to mind are Google Apps and Dyn, both of which have discontinued their free tier.
Not sure about Dyn, but if you had created a Google Apps prior to them removing the free tier - you still have it for free... new customers don't get to use it free but existing free customers are still free.
By the area codes provided by EvanMiller (415 = San Francisco, 650 = Palo Alto) I don't think he meant "free first, then they started charging". I think he meant "got acquired" / "pivoted" "went out of business".
Let's see. There was Apple's iTools, .mac, MobileMe, and now iCloud service (sort of one big evolving service, with some bits chopped off or replaced at various points in time), which has gone from free to paid to freemium.
There's Google Apps for your Domain, which killed off its free service in favor of the $5/user per month service.
Ning shut down their free service and switched to a paid only model.
DynDNS also shut down their free service, only offering paid.
I recall those being free. I don't remember any of them being marketed as "Free forever". If you have even one example that you can document as being falsely advertised as "Free forever"...
I can't speak to the rest, but I still have free Google Apps for my personal domain. They're no longer offering it for new customers, but those who signed up when it was free still have it.
> Software companies have been struggling to sell a mass-market database program ever since Lotus 1-2-3 [that is not Access]
There, I fixed it for you. (disclosure: I worked on a similar tool, had a friend, one of the best programmers I know, who built a similar tool, worked on an ERP system that addressed many of the same use cases, and I started Skysheet, YC W09, with gruseom).
Access is great as a personal, single-user database, but how much software has been written to expand it past that limitation in small businesses? Also, Access isn't available for Mac. And Access doesn't run on your iPhone/iPad. I don't entirely disagree with your comment, but I do think there's room and demand in the market for something like AirTable.
I've personally been dabbling with similar idea for years. Guess I should have invested my time and money in getting it to market.
> Access is great as a personal, single-user database, but how much software has been written to expand it past that limitation in small businesses?
There were (and in all probability still are) many multi-user Access projects in use by small businesses.
> I don't entirely disagree with your comment, but I do think there's room and demand in the market for something like AirTable.
So you don't entirely disagree with a bunch of people who have failed to find this imaginary demand, but you think the demand is there? There is demand for business applications for verticals, and for general ERP functions like timesheets and payroll. The demand for an Access-like or "better spreadsheet" product is all of the "Oh yeah, it sounds cool" variety that never results in sales.
> Software companies have been struggling to make a mass-market database program ever since Lotus 1-2-3 (the "3" was a database)
Not really; there were several post 1-2-3 mass-market database programs that had considerable success (dBase, Paradox, Access, FileMaker), though of those only Access is still successful.
> In my opinion, the FTC ought to prohibit use of this term by tech companies located in the 650 and 415 area codes.
Is this part of an East Bay / San Jose economic development plan?
This looks fantastic! I was drooling during the demo video - you've improved on so many things from the standard spreadsheet at once.
If I could make a request for the API: it's almost impossible to get a simple JSON serialization of a table in Google Spreadsheets. There are so many times where I just want to make a really simple MVP with a backend data source, but don't want a full-fledged Firebase database. If I could just stick my data in an Airtable sheet and point my Javascript to load it and create the page dynamically, that would be ideal.
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
You should give prismic.io a spin. You basicaly define data format in as JSON, CRUD interface is generated just from data description. The data you you add is also JSON you can easily retrive. You can query the data with predicates. Did a few projects with it, didn't need a database, or create a CRUD, such a relive.
No plans to automate. I would have emailed the OP but couldn't see any contact details in their profile.
Detected via a Firefox extension [1] (there are several on AMO). Given the nature and severity of the vulnerability, and how widespread it still is (I get an alert every few days), I'm surprised everyone doesn't use one.
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.
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)
Congrats! I got very excited when I first saw the video. Then I signed in to use it, but got stuck.
For me the UI seems a bit heavy. Not sure what it is about the UI, but it feels very constrained for me. It could just be the color, the size of the fields or something. But I think with a small amount of UI tweak it'll feel more welcoming and happy.
I know I'll use it for sure, but now I just don't see a reason to reach out for it over Google Apps. Which is a challenge you'll face.
For example, your demo apps are all great, but for anyone who is hiring or sales leads are a pain, there is already a fully integrated product out there. For the rest, Google Apps might just work fine.
Basically, I think it comes down to fining your product-market fit and going after that segment.
I don't suppose they've considered making IEEE 754-2008 decimal floating point numbers the default number representation. It's a shame Intel didn't consult Dr. William Kahan earlier in their design of the x87 floating point unit. At this point, binary floating point is deeply entrenched despite most uses outside of scientific modeling being better suited to decimal floating point.
Most spreadsheet calculations are better suited to decimal floating point, and decimal floating point numbers are more intuitive for most users. A surprising number of the "Excel bugs" you find online are people misunderstanding binary floating point numbers, or some of the display hacks Excel uses to hide binary artifacts.
There's also DEC64, Douglas Crockford's proposal for a decimal floating point type to serve as the only numeric type in future programming languages: http://dec64.org/
POWER and RISC-V processors already have hardware support for IEEE 754-2008 decimal floating point numbers, and C# has language support for IEEE 754-2008 decimal floating point.
It seems the main claimed advantage of dec64 over IEEE 754-2008 decimal64 is in the fast-path zero-exponent case. Note that V8, SpiderMonkey, and many other dynamic language implementations use a separate compact fast-path representation of integers that renders this point moot. Also, no benchmarks are provided to show the supposed speed advantages of dec64 libraries over decimal64 libraries.
Also, I doubt the dec64.org's claim that the primary reason for slow uptake of decimal64 is the speed of software implementations.
In short, dec64 is mildly interesting, but its claimed advantages aren't enough to justify abandoning the decimal64 format that already has hardware support and language support in a very popular language. Intel also had a large role in standardizing the decimal64 format, so I suspect they'd be much more likely to implement decimal64 in hardware instead of dec64 in hardware.
Edit: on a side note, it's unfortunate that neither dec64 nor decimal64 forces normalization, complicating comparison and sorting.
It's pretty hard to use a custom floating point representation that isn't supported as a primitive type. To make the matters worse even the standard binary floating point number doesn't map to JSON. E.g. +/- Inf and NaN don't have JSON representation.
We strive hard to provide intuitive user experience and abstract away the complexity of modern computing for non-technical users. At some point we might use a decimal floating point or better yet a fixed point decimal as the default representation for numbers.
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
The "instantly syncs updates with all users" bit caught my eye. I always wonder how people go about implementing that.
Asana works that way, and they have their own framework named Luna that does some functional reactive magic. Meteor, which I've been working with a lot lately and have really enjoyed using, was also created by some ex-Asana people, and enables the same type of real-time synced updates.
I was just wondering if you could share anything about your technology stack or how you accomplish the real-time updates. Are you using Meteor?
You couldn't be more wrong. Yes, websockets would make this easier and more seamless than (say) polling, but the "big deal" is that your entire model changes from:
- There's a source of truth (server) and a single client at a time, ever.
To:
- There can be up to hundreds of clients at the same time, all having write access to the same data.
Meaning:
- Your old fashioned models don't quite cut it - you need something to handle changes happening locally [having to be propagated to the server/network ("committed") and potentially be rejected or changed], and at the same time receive remote updates, apply them to the local objects.
- You're going to have conflicting writes. You don't want to have global locking in such a system, no matter how fine-grained (cell, in this case, I suppose); enter: Merge conflict resolution code (you'll have fun with that). Does it happen on the server? Client? How are conflicting writes resolved? Can the client handle just about any write having to be cancelled, and instead accept another change to the object?
- Saving history states for all (ok, most) of your data, so that things can be rolled back. Kind of necessary when you can have a spreadsheet shared by 100 people, and any of them could delete the entire thing.
Do these features ring a bell? Yes, we're talking about a distributed version control system here, but "you just saying" that all it is, is bidirectional communication? That's why you're being downvoted.
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).
Very impressive, one more congratulation from me. And a couple quick questions:
How do you handle conflicts? E.g. If two users change the same scalar value (of an integer cell, let's say) at the same time. Do you accept one and throw a warning back to the unlucky users?
How much to you cache locally? I had begun a framework such as this at some point, with the ultimate goal of being usable offline via the localStorage cached version (and sync upon connect), so I have a good idea of how much pain you must have gone through sorting this out :)
You wrote your own real-time database engine. You're nuts! (in a very good way). Have you written anything about this? It would be interesting to hear both about the database and the experience of "rolling your own" at such a low level.
Hi, yes--we definitely want to get a dev blog up and start talking about some of this stuff!
Re: conflicts, in the case of a scalar value, last in wins, and the system (if you consider the server and each client as nodes in a distributed system) is eventually consistent (i.e. everyone will eventually see the exact same state). In that particular case, we show the other user's profile picture and highlight the cell to flag that change so you realize somebody else is editing at the same time as you.
Nice. There is probably an argument to be made for a notification when you update something and someone else also updates it and your update loses (i.e. small time difference updates or conflicts + your client wasn't last)
Although to be fair, I suppose "undo" covers this. Can you undo an action taken by someone else? (User A commits "aa", User B commits "bb", User A commits "yy"; Can User A, undo to both "bb" and "aa"?)
>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.
I personally hit this roadblock while trying to build a revision management system for a spreadsheet like Google Drive has. I had a pretty fragile implementation that works within a tangled mess of has-many relations. It was a tough time generalizing the whole mess. I'm looking forward to your insights on this particular problem on your future developer blog! Congratulations.
Spreadsheets have never quite "clicked" with me, but this did. It exposes a lot of functionality that your average person would want out of a spreadsheet in a much friendlier way.
I am really curious on the "database" side though, can this handle a couple of tables with 10k rows linking to one another? Maybe an API that allows me to return JSON with some query language? If so, would be a great tool for CRM like tools and any small/medium data set where a nice UI for editing would come in handy
Thanks for your comments!
We're actively working on performance improvements needed on both the client side and server side, but right now it would be very sluggish at that scale. We do have immediate plans to expose an API, probably sometime early 2015.
This looks great - actually it could be exactly what we need to manage our overbearing CRM spreadsheet. Looking forward to that account invite - would start using it today!
Sounds like Airtable would be pretty ideal for that. You can import that CRM spreadsheet to get started! You can actually start today, just click the "Get it started" button here: https://airtable.com/invite/a3sz9t7b
At first I thought it was just a prettier, easier to use version of Excel. Then you showed me the filtering and I had an "Aha" moment. Excel is quick and easy, but it's hard to ask questions about your data. Databases make it easy to ask questions, but it's not quick and easy. You guys seem to have taken the best of both worlds, added in some super simple short-cuts, and there's a mobile app to boot. Kudos!
After defining 3 tables with related records, some thoughts:
- Trying to enter some records, I pressed space in the checkbox column, "zoom view" appeared instead of changing the value (enter changes the value), I understand that this is a convention in your system, but what's the point of the zoome checkbox? :)
- Detail view shows checkbox columns, as checkbox - name and another value-changing checkbox below, waste of space - record with 4 column takes almost all modal window.
- Changing value of checkbox with enter, disallows submitting detail view, so there is no submit, but then I cannot simply discard changes made in the detail view, when I press ESC - data still changes. To revert changes, I had to press ctrl-z several times.
- I noticed that of the entered characters changed to ?, I'm not shure how cannot replicate it, but entering some strange character, and clicking around does the trick.
- I think you should consider adding standard spreadsheet/browser keyboard shortcuts: F2, alt+down.
- Make page up / page down work.
- Adding related record, could automatically open new detail window - creating unnamed row seem pointless.
Great execution! I wonder if this is what Paul Graham was envisioning when he wrote about a "web-based excel/database hybrid" in his post "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund"[1] in 2008.
> 22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid. People often use Excel as a lightweight database. I suspect there's an opportunity to create the program such users wish existed, and that there are new things you could do if it were web-based. Like make it easier to get data into it, through forms or scraping.
> Don't make it feel like a database. That frightens people. The question to ask is: how much can I let people do without defining structure? You want the database equivalent of a language that makes its easy to keep data in linked lists. (Which means you probably want to write it in one.)
Great concept, implementation look very nice, change your intro video. You're giving me a product tutorial when what I want is to understand the use cases and benefits. I don't care about how to use it (yet), I want to know why to use it. Also, please lose the background music - very distracting in a tutorial.
Really interesting product - one use case I don't see you attacking is stock or financial data. A typical use case would be as follows:
- I want to load up a bunch of stock data - Daily open/close/high/low for a bunch of stocks.
- I'd like to have the tool automatically pull this data from Yahoo Finance or Google Finance.
- Then I'd run formulas on the data - so a simple example is PercentRank on the 50 day moving average.
- Present a summary table with all the other data hidden away.
Right now, I can do this in Google Spreadsheets but it is a lot of work, and I can do this in Excel but it requires manually pulling down the data and then painstaking updating formulas and making sure nothing breaks. I could also do this in R but it's too complex for me.
I read hacker news for a long time and decided to join just to congratulate you for this!
I'm a developer and truly like the database aspect of the app. Linking tables is super easy and I like to organize some things in a certain way. Google Docs is not enough most of the time.
Right now only need it for personal use and totally loving it! One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to do auto increment in keys.
I'm also looking forward for the android version.
I also have a suggestion but not sure if the direction you're going for. I'd love to be able to do stats. Being able to query the data in a certain way (besides filters), building the select statement.
Thank you! We don't do auto-increment keys but is something we're considering (or at least auto column types like date created). We will definitely be adding more analysis features soon. One thing you can do (which may not be too discoverable) is select a range of number cells in a column to get a summary at the bottom.
Any chance you could get the mobile app not lose its cache when 'closed' (or rather 'crashed'/'restarted')?
At the moment, offline support works fine unless the app closes or crashes, at which point it loses all of its data until next connect.
I'd love to use this app frequently and for data I need constant access to, but have a nightmare scenario of it losing its cache just as I walk into a room without internet (London Tube, many offices, ...).
Totally happy for better offline support to go in a paid plan. :)
It's on our short term roadmap along with a lot of other major improvements planned for the mobile app. Totally agree the experience would be greatly improved if it handled reopening the app better!
This looks beautiful! Love the database model, which reminds me of Salesforce's flexibility with an AWESOME front end. Really excited to see how people use it.
I like the presentation. Very easy to follow along in the beginning, but you kinda lose me at 1:59. I think you can do a better job explaining this. Really think that the phone view next to the website view is a great touch.
With todoist if you complete a task it crosses it out, which really looks great visually if you are checking off a list. maybe if you check one of the rows, finished column, it crosses out everything in that row.
Thanks for the feedback. We'll find a way to make the foreign table creation at 1:59 more intuitive.
Re: the auto cross out, one thing you can do is add a filter that filters by "Completed?" = unchecked, which will make each row automatically fade out when you check (you can create a different view to show the Completed books)
The tour seems a little broken in that the callouts sometimes appear in locations for "menu items" before the menu appears but is still very informative.
Have you thought much about automation? For example, it would be awesome if every email I send/receive could create or update a row anchored on the recipient/source email.
Seems niche, but building that means I could completely automate what RelateIQ does best. That's just one example, and the point of this kind of automation is that it enables any workflow I need.
Thanks! Yes, it's definitely on the roadmap. We will support certain types of integrations/automations natively, and also plug in to Zapier/IFTTT for others
This UI would make a fantastic database admin interface.
If this were a JavaScript library that let me use MySQL/PostgreSQL on the back-end, I would be the first to buy a license, even if pricey. I could even live with a reduced feature set, such as no revisions.
Alas, companies can only focus on so many business plans at once. :)
I have been looking for an easy-to-use cloud database and this looks like it!!!! I am kept being amazed at the lack of an app equivalent for MS Access. That is a very useful tool but not fit for the cloud/collaboration age. Kudos!!I think there are tons of people that will use it.
Second, when modifying the properties of a multiple options column you can't see text past a certain point, even though the row is clearly big enough: http://i.imgur.com/6ju4vCe.png
Native mobile SDKs would be fantastic. We often have to develop mobile apps for clients where there is a need for a relational db in the cloud that the client can maintain with data. The app has to access that data to displayed, as well as add new data.
This could be really nice for hobbyist usage for tabletop RPGs, but to fully fit that niche it really needs (a) anonymous sharing (with a read-only mode), and (b) a way to copy a shared 'app' to your own account.
I just imported a movie list with the names and year into a table. I want to automagically import the description from IMDB. What would be the best way to do that without going fully into manual mode?
Awesome homepage and video! Bloody well done. All the best. It looks quite useful and easy to use. Have good export functionalities and handle different OSes and you have a winner!
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.
Well-polished product.. can you u talk a little bit about the design and the front end. what did you use for the UI design and front end. it is clean..
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).
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
This could be a tremendous hit, even without the API. There's billions managed via Excel spreadsheets [citation needed] and Airtable seems to bridge the "spreadsheet-ux/database-power" gap well for those use cases.
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.
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.
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.
The classical music is a nice touch. It already makes me feel sophisticated and smart. Everyone copies Apple's music causes seizure amongst hipsters.
Quick question about the technology used here. How do you sync the data entered from mobile app to the web app? What did you use to create such a beautiful UI?
Here's one use case: i tried importing a 500+ row wine spreadsheet into it (it has columns like type, producer, name, vintage, rating, source etc).
I had to save the file as CSV and import it -- or at least that's what I thought, but filepicker seems to support picking from google drive. I don't know if it would have accepted a spreadsheet.
Your app seems sluggish to scroll compared to Google Docs at that size, and the record density seems low (I see 29 records per page vs 50 on Google Docs). This is using Chrome 38 on Linux.
The "link to another table" seems interesting, but my data came denormalized so I have a column with e.g. 10 different repeated values on 500 rows. Maybe it would be nice to automatically clean that up somehow. For example, I could Copy the column and have a some Paste (unique values only) option. Maybe the dialogue that comes up (suggesting to expand the spreadsheet) could even tell you about that. Or maybe there could be an option to convert a text field to a separated linked table.
I had some conditional formatting set up via Google Docs, which could be nice to have here; e.g. red wines have a red background in that wine type table.
I don't have a simple primary key -- it's really a composite of {wine producer, wine name, vintage}. The app didn't mind importing non-unique values into that first column. I don't know what the alternative might have been -- an auto-generated primary key?
Having said all of the above, I really like Google Docs and it will take some amazing features to make me switch to anything else. Multi-user planning and documentation via docs is great -- I have a shopping list everyone can update and I can see it change real time on the phone in the shop while someone is changing it from their desktop, and it's always up to date.
Thanks a lot for your feedback, these are definitely things we're looking to tackle.
We're planning on improving scrolling performance soon, it's definitely a priority for us to improve our performance for large datasets.
As for the linking, we definitely want to do more to help you normalize your data. We can also infer column types to help with the import process. Doing this type of thing on paste is an interesting idea.
We have some ideas for how to make it so that you don't need a primary column. One thing that you can do now is make the primary column a formula, and then reference other columns to generate a key.
If you're interested in talking about the challenges of creating a performant spreadsheet, I've built a javascript-based spreadsheet backed by a database that's more performant than Google Docs/any open source table available on the internet. I'd be happy to share the techniques.
Edit: reach me at shri (at) freshvc (dot) com
Awesome! Thanks for offering, we would love to hear your thoughts. I'll send you an email.
How about posting the source :P
+1 would love to see the source ;)
Redis would be a good idea to move that data around.
This looks like a nice product. Software companies have been struggling to make a mass-market database program ever since Lotus 1-2-3 (the "3" was a database), but the spreadsheet remains king, despite the fact that for storing structured data, it is almost as bad as a Word document with macros. So I'll be rooting for you.
One complaint: Referring to your Basic plan as being "Free forever" is a bit disingenuous. In my opinion, the FTC ought to prohibit use of this term by tech companies located in the 650 and 415 area codes.
>Referring to your Basic plan as being "Free forever" is a bit disingenuous
How so? I haven't had a company ever tell me this then start charging. Oftentimes they go out of business, but that is a different problem. :)
I'm not sure if the "forever" keyword was ever involved, but two examples that spring to mind are Google Apps and Dyn, both of which have discontinued their free tier.
Not sure about Dyn, but if you had created a Google Apps prior to them removing the free tier - you still have it for free... new customers don't get to use it free but existing free customers are still free.
By the area codes provided by EvanMiller (415 = San Francisco, 650 = Palo Alto) I don't think he meant "free first, then they started charging". I think he meant "got acquired" / "pivoted" "went out of business".
Let's see. There was Apple's iTools, .mac, MobileMe, and now iCloud service (sort of one big evolving service, with some bits chopped off or replaced at various points in time), which has gone from free to paid to freemium.
There's Google Apps for your Domain, which killed off its free service in favor of the $5/user per month service.
Ning shut down their free service and switched to a paid only model.
DynDNS also shut down their free service, only offering paid.
How many more examples do you need?
I recall those being free. I don't remember any of them being marketed as "Free forever". If you have even one example that you can document as being falsely advertised as "Free forever"...
I can't speak to the rest, but I still have free Google Apps for my personal domain. They're no longer offering it for new customers, but those who signed up when it was free still have it.
> Software companies have been struggling to sell a mass-market database program ever since Lotus 1-2-3 [that is not Access]
There, I fixed it for you. (disclosure: I worked on a similar tool, had a friend, one of the best programmers I know, who built a similar tool, worked on an ERP system that addressed many of the same use cases, and I started Skysheet, YC W09, with gruseom).
btw, what's up with SkySheet?
It appears you make reasonable comments, so you should know that you're dead d--b.
MS office has been non-optional for the workplace computer for decades, so any tool has to compete with "free-as-in-had-to-buy-it-anyways".
Access is great as a personal, single-user database, but how much software has been written to expand it past that limitation in small businesses? Also, Access isn't available for Mac. And Access doesn't run on your iPhone/iPad. I don't entirely disagree with your comment, but I do think there's room and demand in the market for something like AirTable.
I've personally been dabbling with similar idea for years. Guess I should have invested my time and money in getting it to market.
> Access is great as a personal, single-user database, but how much software has been written to expand it past that limitation in small businesses?
There were (and in all probability still are) many multi-user Access projects in use by small businesses.
> I don't entirely disagree with your comment, but I do think there's room and demand in the market for something like AirTable.
So you don't entirely disagree with a bunch of people who have failed to find this imaginary demand, but you think the demand is there? There is demand for business applications for verticals, and for general ERP functions like timesheets and payroll. The demand for an Access-like or "better spreadsheet" product is all of the "Oh yeah, it sounds cool" variety that never results in sales.
> Software companies have been struggling to make a mass-market database program ever since Lotus 1-2-3 (the "3" was a database)
Not really; there were several post 1-2-3 mass-market database programs that had considerable success (dBase, Paradox, Access, FileMaker), though of those only Access is still successful.
> In my opinion, the FTC ought to prohibit use of this term by tech companies located in the 650 and 415 area codes.
Is this part of an East Bay / San Jose economic development plan?
This looks fantastic! I was drooling during the demo video - you've improved on so many things from the standard spreadsheet at once.
If I could make a request for the API: it's almost impossible to get a simple JSON serialization of a table in Google Spreadsheets. There are so many times where I just want to make a really simple MVP with a backend data source, but don't want a full-fledged Firebase database. If I could just stick my data in an Airtable sheet and point my Javascript to load it and create the page dynamically, that would be ideal.
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
You could try http://apifox.com to create a simple JSON api instead of spreadsheet
Read-only JSON data from Google Sheets is tricky only because of (1) finding the right URL and (2) ignoring all the cruft.
If you are looking to update the Sheet too I've not explored that far; otherwise let me know which of the above you're having trouble with!
You should give prismic.io a spin. You basicaly define data format in as JSON, CRUD interface is generated just from data description. The data you you add is also JSON you can easily retrive. You can query the data with predicates. Did a few projects with it, didn't need a database, or create a CRUD, such a relive.
Ah, another DabbleDB! I hope you stick around longer. :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dabble_DB
DabbleDB was great. I was so sad it closed.
https://filippo.io/Heartbleed/#airtable.com
Nice! Are you gonna automate checks for each submitted link or this is a one-time thing?
No plans to automate. I would have emailed the OP but couldn't see any contact details in their profile.
Detected via a Firefox extension [1] (there are several on AMO). Given the nature and severity of the vulnerability, and how widespread it still is (I get an alert every few days), I'm surprised everyone doesn't use one.
[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxbleed/
You can reach me at howie @ airtable.com It's fixed now if you try again
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.
Should I be able to access the templates after I auth or do I need an invite?
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)
Congrats! I got very excited when I first saw the video. Then I signed in to use it, but got stuck.
For me the UI seems a bit heavy. Not sure what it is about the UI, but it feels very constrained for me. It could just be the color, the size of the fields or something. But I think with a small amount of UI tweak it'll feel more welcoming and happy.
I know I'll use it for sure, but now I just don't see a reason to reach out for it over Google Apps. Which is a challenge you'll face.
For example, your demo apps are all great, but for anyone who is hiring or sales leads are a pain, there is already a fully integrated product out there. For the rest, Google Apps might just work fine.
Basically, I think it comes down to fining your product-market fit and going after that segment.
I don't suppose they've considered making IEEE 754-2008 decimal floating point numbers the default number representation. It's a shame Intel didn't consult Dr. William Kahan earlier in their design of the x87 floating point unit. At this point, binary floating point is deeply entrenched despite most uses outside of scientific modeling being better suited to decimal floating point.
Most spreadsheet calculations are better suited to decimal floating point, and decimal floating point numbers are more intuitive for most users. A surprising number of the "Excel bugs" you find online are people misunderstanding binary floating point numbers, or some of the display hacks Excel uses to hide binary artifacts.
There's also DEC64, Douglas Crockford's proposal for a decimal floating point type to serve as the only numeric type in future programming languages: http://dec64.org/
POWER and RISC-V processors already have hardware support for IEEE 754-2008 decimal floating point numbers, and C# has language support for IEEE 754-2008 decimal floating point.
It seems the main claimed advantage of dec64 over IEEE 754-2008 decimal64 is in the fast-path zero-exponent case. Note that V8, SpiderMonkey, and many other dynamic language implementations use a separate compact fast-path representation of integers that renders this point moot. Also, no benchmarks are provided to show the supposed speed advantages of dec64 libraries over decimal64 libraries.
Also, I doubt the dec64.org's claim that the primary reason for slow uptake of decimal64 is the speed of software implementations.
In short, dec64 is mildly interesting, but its claimed advantages aren't enough to justify abandoning the decimal64 format that already has hardware support and language support in a very popular language. Intel also had a large role in standardizing the decimal64 format, so I suspect they'd be much more likely to implement decimal64 in hardware instead of dec64 in hardware.
Edit: on a side note, it's unfortunate that neither dec64 nor decimal64 forces normalization, complicating comparison and sorting.
We have :)
It's pretty hard to use a custom floating point representation that isn't supported as a primitive type. To make the matters worse even the standard binary floating point number doesn't map to JSON. E.g. +/- Inf and NaN don't have JSON representation.
We strive hard to provide intuitive user experience and abstract away the complexity of modern computing for non-technical users. At some point we might use a decimal floating point or better yet a fixed point decimal as the default representation for numbers.
Looks pretty great. I'm not sure if I have a use case personally, but seems quite well-executed. Any plans for an Android app?
Also, minor note. On the fifth step of the tour, the word "seperate" is misspelled.
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
The "instantly syncs updates with all users" bit caught my eye. I always wonder how people go about implementing that.
Asana works that way, and they have their own framework named Luna that does some functional reactive magic. Meteor, which I've been working with a lot lately and have really enjoyed using, was also created by some ex-Asana people, and enables the same type of real-time synced updates.
I was just wondering if you could share anything about your technology stack or how you accomplish the real-time updates. Are you using Meteor?
Websocket would be the solution to doing that, especially cross platform. Meteor is built on top of websockets, just saying...
You couldn't be more wrong. Yes, websockets would make this easier and more seamless than (say) polling, but the "big deal" is that your entire model changes from:
- There's a source of truth (server) and a single client at a time, ever.
To:
- There can be up to hundreds of clients at the same time, all having write access to the same data.
Meaning:
- Your old fashioned models don't quite cut it - you need something to handle changes happening locally [having to be propagated to the server/network ("committed") and potentially be rejected or changed], and at the same time receive remote updates, apply them to the local objects.
- You're going to have conflicting writes. You don't want to have global locking in such a system, no matter how fine-grained (cell, in this case, I suppose); enter: Merge conflict resolution code (you'll have fun with that). Does it happen on the server? Client? How are conflicting writes resolved? Can the client handle just about any write having to be cancelled, and instead accept another change to the object?
- Saving history states for all (ok, most) of your data, so that things can be rolled back. Kind of necessary when you can have a spreadsheet shared by 100 people, and any of them could delete the entire thing.
Do these features ring a bell? Yes, we're talking about a distributed version control system here, but "you just saying" that all it is, is bidirectional communication? That's why you're being downvoted.
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).
Very impressive, one more congratulation from me. And a couple quick questions:
How do you handle conflicts? E.g. If two users change the same scalar value (of an integer cell, let's say) at the same time. Do you accept one and throw a warning back to the unlucky users?
How much to you cache locally? I had begun a framework such as this at some point, with the ultimate goal of being usable offline via the localStorage cached version (and sync upon connect), so I have a good idea of how much pain you must have gone through sorting this out :)
You wrote your own real-time database engine. You're nuts! (in a very good way). Have you written anything about this? It would be interesting to hear both about the database and the experience of "rolling your own" at such a low level.
You guys need a dev blog.
Hi, yes--we definitely want to get a dev blog up and start talking about some of this stuff!
Re: conflicts, in the case of a scalar value, last in wins, and the system (if you consider the server and each client as nodes in a distributed system) is eventually consistent (i.e. everyone will eventually see the exact same state). In that particular case, we show the other user's profile picture and highlight the cell to flag that change so you realize somebody else is editing at the same time as you.
Nice. There is probably an argument to be made for a notification when you update something and someone else also updates it and your update loses (i.e. small time difference updates or conflicts + your client wasn't last)
Although to be fair, I suppose "undo" covers this. Can you undo an action taken by someone else? (User A commits "aa", User B commits "bb", User A commits "yy"; Can User A, undo to both "bb" and "aa"?)
Edit to add: Looking forward to the dev blog.
>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.
I personally hit this roadblock while trying to build a revision management system for a spreadsheet like Google Drive has. I had a pretty fragile implementation that works within a tangled mess of has-many relations. It was a tough time generalizing the whole mess. I'm looking forward to your insights on this particular problem on your future developer blog! Congratulations.
Very impressed.
Spreadsheets have never quite "clicked" with me, but this did. It exposes a lot of functionality that your average person would want out of a spreadsheet in a much friendlier way.
I am really curious on the "database" side though, can this handle a couple of tables with 10k rows linking to one another? Maybe an API that allows me to return JSON with some query language? If so, would be a great tool for CRM like tools and any small/medium data set where a nice UI for editing would come in handy
Thanks for your comments! We're actively working on performance improvements needed on both the client side and server side, but right now it would be very sluggish at that scale. We do have immediate plans to expose an API, probably sometime early 2015.
This looks great - actually it could be exactly what we need to manage our overbearing CRM spreadsheet. Looking forward to that account invite - would start using it today!
Sounds like Airtable would be pretty ideal for that. You can import that CRM spreadsheet to get started! You can actually start today, just click the "Get it started" button here: https://airtable.com/invite/a3sz9t7b
At first I thought it was just a prettier, easier to use version of Excel. Then you showed me the filtering and I had an "Aha" moment. Excel is quick and easy, but it's hard to ask questions about your data. Databases make it easy to ask questions, but it's not quick and easy. You guys seem to have taken the best of both worlds, added in some super simple short-cuts, and there's a mobile app to boot. Kudos!
This really looks very nice!
After defining 3 tables with related records, some thoughts:
- Trying to enter some records, I pressed space in the checkbox column, "zoom view" appeared instead of changing the value (enter changes the value), I understand that this is a convention in your system, but what's the point of the zoome checkbox? :)
- Detail view shows checkbox columns, as checkbox - name and another value-changing checkbox below, waste of space - record with 4 column takes almost all modal window.
- Changing value of checkbox with enter, disallows submitting detail view, so there is no submit, but then I cannot simply discard changes made in the detail view, when I press ESC - data still changes. To revert changes, I had to press ctrl-z several times.
- I noticed that of the entered characters changed to ?, I'm not shure how cannot replicate it, but entering some strange character, and clicking around does the trick.
- I think you should consider adding standard spreadsheet/browser keyboard shortcuts: F2, alt+down.
- Make page up / page down work.
- Adding related record, could automatically open new detail window - creating unnamed row seem pointless.
Good luck!
Thanks for the feedback! Good points - will add these to our queue for features
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCVj5RZOqwY
Yes, that's exactly what I was reminded of. It's really sad that DabbleDB is no longer around.
Great execution! I wonder if this is what Paul Graham was envisioning when he wrote about a "web-based excel/database hybrid" in his post "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund"[1] in 2008.
> 22. A web-based Excel/database hybrid. People often use Excel as a lightweight database. I suspect there's an opportunity to create the program such users wish existed, and that there are new things you could do if it were web-based. Like make it easier to get data into it, through forms or scraping.
> Don't make it feel like a database. That frightens people. The question to ask is: how much can I let people do without defining structure? You want the database equivalent of a language that makes its easy to keep data in linked lists. (Which means you probably want to write it in one.)
[1] http://old.ycombinator.com/ideas.html
I wonder what language that makes it easy to keep data in linked lists he might have had in mind.
Obviously, C, where a linked list is the first library every new programmer learns to write.
Great concept, implementation look very nice, change your intro video. You're giving me a product tutorial when what I want is to understand the use cases and benefits. I don't care about how to use it (yet), I want to know why to use it. Also, please lose the background music - very distracting in a tutorial.
Excellent point. The video totally misses the "why" of this product.
Very difficult to get non technical peeps just suddenly ditch spreadsheets.
I think a focus on a specific use case i.e job would be better approach. Seems to be to broad in terms of the jobs that it is addressing.
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
Really interesting product - one use case I don't see you attacking is stock or financial data. A typical use case would be as follows: - I want to load up a bunch of stock data - Daily open/close/high/low for a bunch of stocks. - I'd like to have the tool automatically pull this data from Yahoo Finance or Google Finance. - Then I'd run formulas on the data - so a simple example is PercentRank on the 50 day moving average. - Present a summary table with all the other data hidden away.
Right now, I can do this in Google Spreadsheets but it is a lot of work, and I can do this in Excel but it requires manually pulling down the data and then painstaking updating formulas and making sure nothing breaks. I could also do this in R but it's too complex for me.
Thanks for sharing and good luck!
I read hacker news for a long time and decided to join just to congratulate you for this! I'm a developer and truly like the database aspect of the app. Linking tables is super easy and I like to organize some things in a certain way. Google Docs is not enough most of the time. Right now only need it for personal use and totally loving it! One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to do auto increment in keys. I'm also looking forward for the android version. I also have a suggestion but not sure if the direction you're going for. I'd love to be able to do stats. Being able to query the data in a certain way (besides filters), building the select statement.
Thank you! We don't do auto-increment keys but is something we're considering (or at least auto column types like date created). We will definitely be adding more analysis features soon. One thing you can do (which may not be too discoverable) is select a range of number cells in a column to get a summary at the bottom.
Any chance you could get the mobile app not lose its cache when 'closed' (or rather 'crashed'/'restarted')?
At the moment, offline support works fine unless the app closes or crashes, at which point it loses all of its data until next connect.
I'd love to use this app frequently and for data I need constant access to, but have a nightmare scenario of it losing its cache just as I walk into a room without internet (London Tube, many offices, ...).
Totally happy for better offline support to go in a paid plan. :)
It's on our short term roadmap along with a lot of other major improvements planned for the mobile app. Totally agree the experience would be greatly improved if it handled reopening the app better!
You guys should check out www.realm.io, it will be a great way to handle this type of stuff quickly. I am an iOS engineer there
This looks beautiful! Love the database model, which reminds me of Salesforce's flexibility with an AWESOME front end. Really excited to see how people use it.
I like the presentation. Very easy to follow along in the beginning, but you kinda lose me at 1:59. I think you can do a better job explaining this. Really think that the phone view next to the website view is a great touch.
With todoist if you complete a task it crosses it out, which really looks great visually if you are checking off a list. maybe if you check one of the rows, finished column, it crosses out everything in that row.
Thanks for the feedback. We'll find a way to make the foreign table creation at 1:59 more intuitive.
Re: the auto cross out, one thing you can do is add a filter that filters by "Completed?" = unchecked, which will make each row automatically fade out when you check (you can create a different view to show the Completed books)
This is the absolute best for structured data... been a beta user and hooked on the mobile app now. It's basically replaced evernote for me.
I will look into this more so good job.
The tour seems a little broken in that the callouts sometimes appear in locations for "menu items" before the menu appears but is still very informative.
See image before menu: http://bit.ly/1xq1XYI And image after menu: http://bit.ly/1rprJrk
Thanks for letting us know, will look into it now
Congrats this looks awesome!
Have you thought much about automation? For example, it would be awesome if every email I send/receive could create or update a row anchored on the recipient/source email.
Seems niche, but building that means I could completely automate what RelateIQ does best. That's just one example, and the point of this kind of automation is that it enables any workflow I need.
Thanks! Yes, it's definitely on the roadmap. We will support certain types of integrations/automations natively, and also plug in to Zapier/IFTTT for others
This UI would make a fantastic database admin interface.
If this were a JavaScript library that let me use MySQL/PostgreSQL on the back-end, I would be the first to buy a license, even if pricey. I could even live with a reduced feature set, such as no revisions.
Alas, companies can only focus on so many business plans at once. :)
I have been looking for an easy-to-use cloud database and this looks like it!!!! I am kept being amazed at the lack of an app equivalent for MS Access. That is a very useful tool but not fit for the cloud/collaboration age. Kudos!!I think there are tons of people that will use it.
First off, love it!
Second, when modifying the properties of a multiple options column you can't see text past a certain point, even though the row is clearly big enough: http://i.imgur.com/6ju4vCe.png
Thanks for pointing this out! We'll get it fixed.
Native mobile SDKs would be fantastic. We often have to develop mobile apps for clients where there is a need for a relational db in the cloud that the client can maintain with data. The app has to access that data to displayed, as well as add new data.
Gorgeous work — and from poking around in the console a bit, it looks as though you're using the latest version of Backbone.js.
Any interest in having Airtable featured on the list of example apps on the Backbone homepage? If yes, drop me a line...
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?
Ah yes, it is. I'm jashkenas at gmail. Thanks!
This could be really nice for hobbyist usage for tabletop RPGs, but to fully fit that niche it really needs (a) anonymous sharing (with a read-only mode), and (b) a way to copy a shared 'app' to your own account.
I just imported a movie list with the names and year into a table. I want to automagically import the description from IMDB. What would be the best way to do that without going fully into manual mode?
We don't do anything of this sort yet, but if you can get the data into a CSV you can import that into a table.
Awesome homepage and video! Bloody well done. All the best. It looks quite useful and easy to use. Have good export functionalities and handle different OSes and you have a winner!
How does this compares to products like Bento (RIP) and Filemaker?
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.
Well-polished product.. can you u talk a little bit about the design and the front end. what did you use for the UI design and front end. it is clean..
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).
Great... but could be useless without an API.
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
Just did! Thanks!
This could be a tremendous hit, even without the API. There's billions managed via Excel spreadsheets [citation needed] and Airtable seems to bridge the "spreadsheet-ux/database-power" gap well for those use cases.
For someone who has spent a lot of time in Excel hacking things together this looks very useful.
Is pricing per user? It doesn't seem like it is, but that seems like a missed opportunity.
Hi, yes it is, sorry for confusion! It's fixed now on https://airtable.com/pricing
I've been following this company for a while and have been a beta tester. Great product!
Great product. Nice to see Howie start another startup (Remember Etacts?)
Are there any plans to make this scriptable with say Javascript?
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.
Reach out if you need any help on the Zapier front :)
Thanks! Will do. Been using Zapier personally for some misc personal workflow (receipts=>evernote=>email to our accountant). Love it!
Not sure what kind of back-end is accessible to users, but I bet Airtable could fit into this flow nicely: https://zapier.com/engineering/database-query-automation/
+1 for IFTTT. It would be great to create Airtable files from third party sources: forms, emails, other apps, etc.
Killer product and beautiful video. Congrats!
Reminds me of the RelateIQ look and feel.
Impressive!
can you tell us more about the stack used?
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
great work. for anyone who wants an open source spreadsheet editor I can recommend handsontable
No way this a spreadsheet. This is just a CRUD app with data displayed in rows. Zero chance of catching with spreadsheet users.
Why does it require Google auth?
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.
Hi Andrew! It's cumbersome but at some point you might want to consider LDAP/AD for enterprises who want to hook into it as well.
I hesitate entering my credentials because of http://furbo.org/2014/09/24/in-app-browsers-considered-harmf...
any chance we could this as a axax front-end to mysql database? I'd pay for it. Looks amazing. Would solve so many issues.
The classical music is a nice touch. It already makes me feel sophisticated and smart. Everyone copies Apple's music causes seizure amongst hipsters.
Quick question about the technology used here. How do you sync the data entered from mobile app to the web app? What did you use to create such a beautiful UI?
Thanks!
Re: data sync, see this comment thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374364
Re: UI, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8374446
I know its a tall order but any future in open sourcing some parts of the framework?