

Permanent - the new spreadsheet for iPad - jashmenn
http://getpermanent.com/

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zavulon
I've opened the site, searched for Dropbox, didn't find it, and closed tab.

Sorry for harsh feedback, and feel free to disregard it if Dropbox users are
not a significant portion of your target market.

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kcl
We'll be launching Dropbox support soon. Hope you'll come back to us then.

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chrisdevereux
Something that may require some thought if you want to do this is how you
handle import/export of documents with embedded scripts.

You'll need to be very careful not to fall to the "applications that download
additional code" rule there. This happened to Codea
([http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/Talk/discussion/comment/14504#...](http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/Talk/discussion/comment/14504#Comment_14504)),
and afaik they still haven't managed to get their project sharing feature re-
approved.

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julianz
I'd love to play with a powerful Lua-enabled spreadsheet on the iPad, but the
pricing is miles off. It's NZD 13.99, the same as the Apple productivity apps
and Photoshop, but that price is apparently a 50% discount and the app looks a
long way from finished. At NZD 4.99 I'd buy it and start playing without
thinking twice.

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jwr
Your page does very little to convince me to buy the app.

Think about it this way: most customers who will consider your app have
already bought Numbers. So how is your app better than Numbers? Lua scripting
sounds good, but it might not be enough. As for the rest of the page, your
screenshots tell me very little about the app capabilities, while the
"feature" descriptions are overly vague.

I will likely buy the app just hoping that it will work better (and faster)
than Numbers, but I am not convinced - it feels like a die toss.

I am probably your target customer, so you might want to consider this.

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vicm
I tend to use Numbers and iCloud all the time, because of the sync between
desktop, iphone and ipad. The iphone might not be ideal, but I love that I can
get at a spreadsheet easily when I'm mobile, and I don't always carry my ipad.

For me I wouldn't consider switching from Numbers without cross platform
(desktop/phone/tablet) availability of my data.

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jorgeleo
For 9.99 introductory price I think is awesome.

3 questions: 1\. With the Lua script, can I call a web service or a web page
to get an xml or or a json with data and load that response directly to a
sheet?

2\. How do I put a button or something to trigger a script?

3\. Can I open one of your files from a web link? as in "Open in..."

With those 3 items I have a server controlled reporting app.

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bhntr3
I wonder if this will work. I feel like spreadsheets are inherently
satisficing mechanisms for data. I think the reason excel has done so well is
that its a default when normal folks don't really need much. I wonder if
people actively seek out "better" spreadsheet tools or if they just seek out
tools to do a task better when excel fails.

Either way putting it on a tablet will definitely help.

EDIT: I should say that I think a better spreadsheet is a really important and
interesting thing to build.

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niggler
I don't see a way to import or export data, and the app description says that
CSV and XLSX and XLS import and export are pending.

Sorry, but without a way to bring data in or out this app looks unfinished.

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kcl
Import/export is coming. Probably in the next release.

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pc86
Have you decided on what formats and/or third party services you will be
exporting to?

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kcl
All within reason. We're not going to try to be a silo, if that's what you
mean. We want to be as interoperable with other applications as possible.

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rayiner
I become more and more convicned every day that a spreadsheet is the ultimate
"manage the stuff in my head" interface. Putting it onto an iPad is genius.

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clevernapkins
I agree, for a while I was a beta tester for another spreadsheet app on the
Ipad : <http://www.binarythumb.com/>

It's pretty awesome even if you don't do Excel-like things with it. Just
having a spreadsheet to organize stuff is really handy on the ipad.

I'm going to give this app a try, it looks well put together.

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abuzzooz
GRID looks very nice. And they do a good job showing off its capabilities in
the videos.

The only problem is that I couldn't find a link to buy it from. Is it
available yet?

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clevernapkins
I don't believe it's available yet as they recently closed the beta testing
period.

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jorgeleo
The link is in their website:

[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/permanent-new-
spreadsheet/id...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/permanent-new-
spreadsheet/id602402480?ls=1&mt=8)

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abuzzooz
This is not GRID.

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eridius
This looks very cool. My big worry is the only place I'll be able to get at my
spreadsheet is on my iPad. Being able to sync with spreadsheets on Google
Drive would be a fantastic step towards interoperability with other
people/software.

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mjhea0
Let's face it, if you're going to create a new spreadsheet, it must have the
ability to port over to Google and Excel. Otherwise, you just have another
data silo.

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newman314
In all honesty, I'm not sure how useful this will be for me. I deal with
spreadsheets many columns wide and a big screen is what helps.

Rather, I would love to see someone work on being able to seamlessly hook up
various data sources in the background to Excel so that I can still use Excel
as the UI while having a proper db in the background.

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tlholaday
Scripting in Lua? Neat!

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FreshCode
This is great. Please enlarge your feature-copy font to 16px and set line-
height to 1.62em so I can read it :).

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lancewiggs
Great to see. I expect to be disappointed with this first release, but
purchased anyway to support what this could become in the future. The undo
functionality provides a glimpse of what possible paths Microsoft has
abandoned in favour of never-ending "enhancements" to the UI.

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lancewiggs
Ok and now I am stuck. It's not obvious how to select cells for say
'=sum(....'. It's not obvious how to remove a sheet from a project. It's not
obvious where I can get help And it's now crashing.

So a bit alpha to be charging for it, but please keep going.

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kcl
You can bring up the delete button for a sheet by right swiping the sheet's
cell after tapping on the project breadcrumb. This sounds clumsy written out.
Inside the app the gesture should be natural.

Multiple cell selection isn't implemented in 1.0. We had to be choosy about
what feature we supported in 1.0, as there are a lot of spreadsheet features
people want. Specifying the cells in the formula by typing them out does work,
however.

The crashes we'll fix. Thanks for the kind words, we'll keep at it.

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sandstrom
Given the usage of spreadsheets in companies (humongous) and how much room
there is for improvements to certain aspects of Excel (better scripting is one
thing that comes to mind) I think this has great potential.

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danso
Anything that boosts the profile of the humble spreadsheet gets a thumbs up
from me. I almost always start taking notes with a spreadsheet. It may be
something as simple as two fields: one for the actual note and two for a
category. If it's trivial to add a timestamp, I'll do that too.

The notes end up being far more organized than as if I had just put them
chronologically into an empty text editor (though in a pinch, I may just write
my notes in a tab delimited format and import them into a spreadsheet). Even
if I never need to chronologically reverse sort or sort by category.

More importantly, when doing a research project, it serves as a checklist for
what I need to do. Awhile back I wanted to track homicides in my city and so I
started off with just name of victim, name of suspect, age, time of day, link
to a news article, time of arrest, address, etc. Without a spreadsheet, you'd
forget at least one of those details as you did your research in the
traditional note taking fashion.

And when you make your model more complex: i.e. realize that you need to
record time of arrest, charges filed, age of suspect, etc., the spreadsheet
makes it easy to backtrack and fill your past data rows.

And when you realize you need to make your data model more complicated: the
fact that a number of suspects could be implicated and charged for a single
homicide, and face various charges, you are all ready to have your "notes" be
put into a database.

And now that it's in a database, it's just a weekend of hacking to make a
homicides website or a map.

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digikata
Spreadsheets are a pretty good tool, and I've used them to sling data along
with databases, scripting languages, and compiled programming languages.
However I always feel like there should be a next generation ad-hoc data tool
coming along that preserves the accessibility of a spreadsheet, while
expanding capability in a more manageable way. Once you start needing or
wanting capabilities of a programming language, you're stuck in the of the
confines of what the spreadsheet framework provides, or need to mostly abandon
the spreadsheet to make the leap of putting the data into some other
programming environment. It's not hard, and we aren't lacking in ways to make
the leap, but it seems like there should be a better way.

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Retric
IMO, Access is closer to a spreadsheet than a Database and fills that need
fairly well. (By that I mean how the UI is setup and what it focuses on.) IMO
there is a huge opertunity for a similar interface and a much better back end.
Something like sharepoint + access.

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jordo37
I have built a couple enterprise one-off tools on Access and at the time (6
years ago) it was fantastic - easy to get access to remote databases, sync to
local stores, run complicated data reports or structure entries using forms so
that anyone can use it and it would look nice. I think Google docs + forms
fills some of this function now, but I still think that was some of the most
raw fun I have had using code to quickly and efficiently solve a business
problem.

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larrywright
I think this looks very cool from a technical standpoint, but I don't know how
useful it is. Especially without a corresponding desktop application.

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jey
How is it that they can allow scripting in Lua? Doesn't the iOS SDK ToS forbid
interpreters other than JavaScriptCore?

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josho
At one point in time the TOS prohibited custom script engines like Lau. But,
Apple (likely to cater to some of the large game companies on iOS) eased back
that restriction 1 or 2 years ago.

I believe that downloading scripts/code and allowing users to enter scripts
may still prohibited.

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eridius
Users can enter scripts. And I believe you can even transfer scripts using the
iTunes file transfer functionality. You just can't download them over the
internet.

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csomar
Looks good.

If you are interest in getting it reviewed in iPad.appstorm send me an email
with a coupon code.

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mifeng
I like the design, but the thought of using a spreadsheet without a keyboard
makes my head hurt.

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kcl
You can hook up a keyboard to your iPad, if you like. Not sure if that would
solve your problem. Keyboard support is on our planned list of features. Most
iPad users are fine with the touch screen keyboard, so we haven't prioritized
physical keyboard support yet.

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mifeng
I do like where you're going... just had to edit a Google doc spreadsheet on
my phone (painful). As a long-time Excel user,I just can't imagine giving up
keyboard shortcuts, etc.

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kamakazizuru
what would really make or break this for me is if it is compatible with excel
sheets..

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kcl
Version 1.1 should import/export Excel sheets. Version 1.0 doesn't
import/export so that we could launch quicker and make sure everything is
stable.

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bsg75
Give me a desktop version, so that sheets and scripts can be shared and I am
sold.

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rubyrescue
There's also a YC tablet spreadsheet startup out there - GRID.

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zachwill
The ability to script with Lua is incredibly smart.

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RBerenguel
iOS6... The time to upgrade my iPad 1 to a newer model is getting closer by
the minute

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martinced
Amazing. First all the semi-recent talks about Excel really being the one
thing making the real-world work at all (not Linux, not OS X, not Google,
no... Excel was the word)...

Then now that people are showing other spreadsheets suddenly we can hear the
whiners: _"But I need my Excel shortcuts"_ and _"But I need my wide-screen to
show all my Excel colums"_.

I'm pretty sure that should we live one day in a world dominated by iOS /
Android and online HTML5 / iOS / Android / Google Docs spreadsheets (we're
already kinda are in that one in the SMEs world that said), we'd still hear
the cries of a few corporate drones (or MS astroturfers) telling us that Excel
is the one and only spreadsheet preventing the planet from imploding.

