Aitable is surprisingly great. Congratulations.
Of course you can’t possibly offer every feature, and many things are missing, e.g. graphs and gantt charts.
There’s a good API, so some users can just code the things they need. But of course there must be people who have already made the feature that they need. So what I’m thinking is, wouldn’t it be great if airtable had a way of officially hosting these projects?
I’m not a frequent web developer so my suggested design is quite naive:
- Airtable creates a simple js library for logging in + getting at the API (i.e. if somebody is logged in to airtable already, there’s a simple way at getting at their data, ‘Authorise app’ style or something like that).
- Developers make a little js app which uses that Airtable js library along with something like chart.js The app should be able to run against any user’s data (perhaps with a config.json, or with an interface).
- Developer uploads to github with a specific airtable_app.json in the root folder
- Developer submits the github repo and specific commit/tag/branch to AirTable
- Ideally, AirTable verifies that the code doesn’t upload all the users data off to a server somewhere, or do something crazy with their data
- AirTable hosts the project in a gallery of other projects.
- Users can just browse through the gallery and test all the different projects with their own data. If they like one, they can fork it / download the code.
This way many feature ideas could be created and tested by the community before being implemented in Airtable proper.
Another simple way would be simply to have a blog of user generated Airtable apps.
Ultimately it might even be possible to have something like the Unity Asset Store where developers can sell their Airtable apps
