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).
Not sure what you mean by "beyond Google Sheets" space, but there have been some cool spreadsheet tools emerging recently.
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.
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!
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.
Airtable looks like exactly what the world needs for a modern system to let everyday users manage data well rather than bunging it all in a spreadsheet.
But the row limits are too low for many obvious uses. I assume this is for technical reasons? Otherwise it doesn't make much sense that if you pay for 20 users to share a database you get the same number of rows as if you pay for two.
1) Foreign keys to users (for e.g. "assigned to", "team members")
2) Better programmability - right now, anything moderately complex requires a bunch of intermediate column (that then have to be hidden from all views). Objective spreadsheets (MIT SAIL) seems like something to aim for.
3) Programmatic (API) access to row history - at least read, for reports
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.
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) and ZenBase (http://getzenbase.com). They are similar products in this space.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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