4 ms·

Ragic – Editable forms with relational data

94 points by refik 10y ago

davidascher 10y ago
HTTP only sign up page? really? in 2017?
- saycheese 10y ago
  Top sign-up link is https, but you're correct that it's possible to load it as http and the sign-up in the body of the page links to the http version. They need to redirect any http to https for the sign-up page; they already do this for the login page.
fiatjaf 10y ago
Many updates, new features and a redesign? Seems very nice.
bikamonki 10y ago
Your pricing page is not mobile-friendly.
zellyn 10y ago
Is this like dabbledb?
- derefr 10y ago
  Exactly what I was going to compare this to. And I hope it is—DabbleDB was excellent. This looks like it has more interoperation features (Excel synchronization) but maybe doesn't have the auto-guessed column-types + relations that DabbleDB had.
  - howsta 10y ago
    Fwiw Airtable has often been compared with DabbleDB :). https://mobile.twitter.com/patrickc/status/515689689823473664 https://mobile.twitter.com/patrickc/status/51568968982347366...
mtdewcmu 10y ago
This seems to serve the same purpose as, e.g., Access. What is different about this?
- bcg1 10y ago
  1) Your data is in the cloud, you do have do worry about controlling it yourself. 2) There is no perpetual license to worry about, only pay as long as you need your data. 3) Access allowed business people to muddle through creating database that IT hated to have to maintain... this is obviously different.
- peteretep 10y ago
  Access on a Mac or mobile isn't there
hobofan 10y ago
I would really like to see a good tool in the "beyond Google Sheets"-space. I tried Ragic just now for 10-15 minutes and it is far from simple, like their landing page claims. It is nothing at all like a database and it also is nothing at all like a spreadsheet (and not in a good way). Edit: Looking at previous discussions about it here on HN, the criticism in this 5 year old comment all still holds true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960207
- kornish 10y ago
  Not sure what you mean by "beyond Google Sheets" space, but there have been some cool spreadsheet tools emerging recently. http://www.alphasheets.com/ http://www.alphasheets.com/ is still mostly in stealth (as far as I can tell) but they let you mix and match SQL, Python, R, and Excel formulae in a spreadsheet. Airtable seems pretty polished (https://airtable.com/ https://airtable.com/). Both of these are definitely spreadsheets, though. Not sure if you're looking for something more specialized for a certain vertical or problem domain.
  - howsta 10y ago
    Founder of Airtable here--Airtable is actually a relational database with foreign key relationships (the technicalities of which are abstracted away from the user). It's designed specifically to be somewhere between the accessibility of a spreadsheet and the customizability/structure of a Filemaker/Access/Force.com, all with a much more modern UX and collaboration experience. Airtable.com/product or Airtable.com/templates offers some more context!
    - refik 10y ago
      Things that I would like to see in Airtable: 1) Being able to link tables in different bases https://community.airtable.com/t/link-to-other-base/107/112 https://community.airtable.com/t/link-to-other-base/107/112 2) Being able to create linked records from form view
      - 10y ago
wmccullough 10y ago
> "Over 90% of enterprise IT projects are delivered late." Due to piss poor project managers and lack of business requirements and/or realistic deadlines.
- peteretep 10y ago
  Mmm, I've worked (as a developer) with a lot of shitty developers responsible for project death through incompetence.
- Tenhundfeld 10y ago
  Lateness is a mostly meaningless metric. On the one hand, it's vague, and on the other hand, it has little inherent value. Doubly meaningless. For example, let's say a team is given 4 projects. They provide rough effort estimates and schedule those projects on the calendar, with normal buffer for support issues, changes, etc. Then a new ultra-high-priority, life-of-the-company-at-stake project comes down from the CEO, and everything else gets pushed back by months. So, are those original 4 projects technically late? By many studies' definitions, they would be categorized late. Furthermore, does it matter if they are late? If you're late on 80% of your projects but deliver on time for 100% of your critical projects, is that so bad? Not having the demo ready for the tradeshow is a real problem. Not having the compliance changes in by the deadline is a real problem. Not having the integration upgrade done before your partner turns off the old version is a real problem. And so on. Missing some date that was arbitrarily chosen, probably months or years ago, eh, that doesn't necessarily bother me. I'm not arguing that it's good to be late. It's obviously better for projects to be delivered when expected to let businesses make projections, plan, etc. I'm just saying the real world is messy and full of tradeoffs. If you're constantly reacting to fires and unexpectedly missing deadlines, that's a sign that better project management is needed. However, if you're working with business stakeholders to reprioritize efforts and adapt to changing realities, that can be good in my opinion – even though externally it can appear that projects are "late". Edit: To be clear, I'm not really agreeing or disagreeing with parent's comment on the source of lateness. I'm commenting on using stats like these as evidence that something is broken in software development.
sebringj 10y ago
More like tRagic based on the comments here.
etchalon 10y ago
How is this better than Filemaker Pro?
chenster 10y ago
This particular application has name called database application builder (DAB). I think that's probably how DabbleDB got its name. Also checkout out Caspio (http://caspio.com http://caspio.com) and ZenBase (http://getzenbase.com http://getzenbase.com). They are similar products in this space.
- avibryant 10y ago
  Huh. No, for the record, we'd never heard that acronym when we chose the name for Dabble DB.
macmac 10y ago
DabbleDB anyone? One of those products that really should have been more successful.
tluyben2 10y ago
We have been running Flexlists.com[0] for many years as a 'background sideproject'. Not to make money; it was to scratch an itch and I still use it a lot. We launch somewhere before DabbleDB I think and some others and they all folded so we never took it further. Ours is trivially simple to use which I do not find the case with others. The interface is somewhat dated and the source code has only been updated for security in the recent 5 years. I am going to continue with it soon as I do believe there is something and Flexlists has enough users and fans. Good to see people are still working in this space. [0] http://flexlists.com http://flexlists.com
collyw 10y ago
Isn't this basically the same as MS Access?
_pmf_ 10y ago
It's always nice to see tools tackling the everyday challenges of allowing the non-programmer to solve his problems instead of hot air duds like LightTable and Eve that try to create some revolutionary paradigm that is unfamiliar to both programmers and non-programmers.
galfarragem 10y ago
A bit off topic: their landing page is really very well done. My only picking is their name: Ragic!.. Simpler software doesn't have to sound unprofessional.

94 points by refik 10y ago

davidascher 10y ago

HTTP only sign up page? really? in 2017?

saycheese 10y ago
Top sign-up link is https, but you're correct that it's possible to load it as http and the sign-up in the body of the page links to the http version. They need to redirect any http to https for the sign-up page; they already do this for the login page.

fiatjaf 10y ago

Many updates, new features and a redesign? Seems very nice.

bikamonki 10y ago

Your pricing page is not mobile-friendly.

zellyn 10y ago

Is this like dabbledb?

derefr 10y ago
Exactly what I was going to compare this to. And I hope it is—DabbleDB was excellent. This looks like it has more interoperation features (Excel synchronization) but maybe doesn't have the auto-guessed column-types + relations that DabbleDB had.
- howsta 10y ago
  Fwiw Airtable has often been compared with DabbleDB :). https://mobile.twitter.com/patrickc/status/515689689823473664 https://mobile.twitter.com/patrickc/status/51568968982347366...

mtdewcmu 10y ago

This seems to serve the same purpose as, e.g., Access. What is different about this?

bcg1 10y ago
1) Your data is in the cloud, you do have do worry about controlling it yourself. 2) There is no perpetual license to worry about, only pay as long as you need your data. 3) Access allowed business people to muddle through creating database that IT hated to have to maintain... this is obviously different.
peteretep 10y ago
Access on a Mac or mobile isn't there

hobofan 10y ago

I would really like to see a good tool in the "beyond Google Sheets"-space. I tried Ragic just now for 10-15 minutes and it is far from simple, like their landing page claims. It is nothing at all like a database and it also is nothing at all like a spreadsheet (and not in a good way). Edit: Looking at previous discussions about it here on HN, the criticism in this 5 year old comment all still holds true: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960207 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3960207

kornish 10y ago
Not sure what you mean by "beyond Google Sheets" space, but there have been some cool spreadsheet tools emerging recently. http://www.alphasheets.com/ http://www.alphasheets.com/ is still mostly in stealth (as far as I can tell) but they let you mix and match SQL, Python, R, and Excel formulae in a spreadsheet. Airtable seems pretty polished (https://airtable.com/ https://airtable.com/). Both of these are definitely spreadsheets, though. Not sure if you're looking for something more specialized for a certain vertical or problem domain.
- howsta 10y ago
  Founder of Airtable here--Airtable is actually a relational database with foreign key relationships (the technicalities of which are abstracted away from the user). It's designed specifically to be somewhere between the accessibility of a spreadsheet and the customizability/structure of a Filemaker/Access/Force.com, all with a much more modern UX and collaboration experience. Airtable.com/product or Airtable.com/templates offers some more context!
  - refik 10y ago
    Things that I would like to see in Airtable: 1) Being able to link tables in different bases https://community.airtable.com/t/link-to-other-base/107/112 https://community.airtable.com/t/link-to-other-base/107/112 2) Being able to create linked records from form view
    - 10y ago

wmccullough 10y ago

> "Over 90% of enterprise IT projects are delivered late." Due to piss poor project managers and lack of business requirements and/or realistic deadlines.

peteretep 10y ago
Mmm, I've worked (as a developer) with a lot of shitty developers responsible for project death through incompetence.
Tenhundfeld 10y ago
Lateness is a mostly meaningless metric. On the one hand, it's vague, and on the other hand, it has little inherent value. Doubly meaningless. For example, let's say a team is given 4 projects. They provide rough effort estimates and schedule those projects on the calendar, with normal buffer for support issues, changes, etc. Then a new ultra-high-priority, life-of-the-company-at-stake project comes down from the CEO, and everything else gets pushed back by months. So, are those original 4 projects technically late? By many studies' definitions, they would be categorized late. Furthermore, does it matter if they are late? If you're late on 80% of your projects but deliver on time for 100% of your critical projects, is that so bad? Not having the demo ready for the tradeshow is a real problem. Not having the compliance changes in by the deadline is a real problem. Not having the integration upgrade done before your partner turns off the old version is a real problem. And so on. Missing some date that was arbitrarily chosen, probably months or years ago, eh, that doesn't necessarily bother me. I'm not arguing that it's good to be late. It's obviously better for projects to be delivered when expected to let businesses make projections, plan, etc. I'm just saying the real world is messy and full of tradeoffs. If you're constantly reacting to fires and unexpectedly missing deadlines, that's a sign that better project management is needed. However, if you're working with business stakeholders to reprioritize efforts and adapt to changing realities, that can be good in my opinion – even though externally it can appear that projects are "late". Edit: To be clear, I'm not really agreeing or disagreeing with parent's comment on the source of lateness. I'm commenting on using stats like these as evidence that something is broken in software development.

sebringj 10y ago

More like tRagic based on the comments here.

etchalon 10y ago

How is this better than Filemaker Pro?

chenster 10y ago

This particular application has name called database application builder (DAB). I think that's probably how DabbleDB got its name. Also checkout out Caspio (http://caspio.com http://caspio.com) and ZenBase (http://getzenbase.com http://getzenbase.com). They are similar products in this space.

avibryant 10y ago
Huh. No, for the record, we'd never heard that acronym when we chose the name for Dabble DB.

macmac 10y ago

DabbleDB anyone? One of those products that really should have been more successful.

tluyben2 10y ago

We have been running Flexlists.com[0] for many years as a 'background sideproject'. Not to make money; it was to scratch an itch and I still use it a lot. We launch somewhere before DabbleDB I think and some others and they all folded so we never took it further. Ours is trivially simple to use which I do not find the case with others. The interface is somewhat dated and the source code has only been updated for security in the recent 5 years. I am going to continue with it soon as I do believe there is something and Flexlists has enough users and fans. Good to see people are still working in this space. [0] http://flexlists.com http://flexlists.com

collyw 10y ago

Isn't this basically the same as MS Access?

_pmf_ 10y ago

It's always nice to see tools tackling the everyday challenges of allowing the non-programmer to solve his problems instead of hot air duds like LightTable and Eve that try to create some revolutionary paradigm that is unfamiliar to both programmers and non-programmers.

galfarragem 10y ago

A bit off topic: their landing page is really very well done. My only picking is their name: Ragic!.. Simpler software doesn't have to sound unprofessional.