
Ragic – Editable forms with relational data - refik
http://www.ragic.com
======
hobofan
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
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
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!

~~~
jpster
Thank you for Airtable, I'm a big fan, especially of the Zapier integration.
Lately there has been a lot of discussion on Hacker News about projects like
Opps Daily [1] and Nugget [2], where people write in about some pain point
they have in their daily job that might be solved by custom-built software. I
get the impression that Airtable + Zapier could solve a lot of those use
cases.

\-- [1] [http://oppsdaily.com/](http://oppsdaily.com/) [2]
[https://nugget.one/daily](https://nugget.one/daily)

~~~
howsta
Thanks for the kind words! We love Zapier and use it extensively ourselves :
). Here's some example workflows Zapier wrote about:
[https://zapier.com/blog/airtable-
automations/](https://zapier.com/blog/airtable-automations/)
[https://zapier.com/blog/how-zapier-uses-
airtable/](https://zapier.com/blog/how-zapier-uses-airtable/)

------
wmccullough
> "Over 90% of enterprise IT projects are delivered late."

Due to piss poor project managers and lack of business requirements and/or
realistic deadlines.

~~~
Tenhundfeld
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.

------
chenster
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
Huh. No, for the record, we'd never heard that acronym when we chose the name
for Dabble DB.

------
tluyben2
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)

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

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galfarragem
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.

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collyw
Isn't this basically the same as MS Access?

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bikamonki
Your pricing page is not mobile-friendly.

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zellyn
Is this like dabbledb?

~~~
derefr
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
Fwiw Airtable has often been compared with DabbleDB :).

[https://mobile.twitter.com/patrickc/status/51568968982347366...](https://mobile.twitter.com/patrickc/status/515689689823473664)

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

~~~
bcg1
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.

------
_pmf_
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.

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

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etchalon
How is this better than Filemaker Pro?

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davidascher
HTTP only sign up page? really? in 2017?

~~~
saycheese
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.

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sebringj
More like tRagic based on the comments here.

