Hello everyone,
Apologies if this isn’t the ideal place to share, but I wanted to pass along the announcement. After watching a few videos on YouTube, it looks like Airplane assisted Airtable with their implementation of Interfaces. The UX looks very similar. Here’s the announcement and their YouTube Channel. I am excited about the improvements this will bring to the future of interfaces.
Maybe there is some technology sharing but probably Airplane going towards the exit anyhow, many players and so they said, look, you want to continue, you can save yourself the money. Or is it admission of Airtable that all is too late and with recent layoffs and budget cuts, you can’t catch the train anymore, so take the next one.
Their philosophy seems a bit different, but maybe the enterprise customers is what are asking for different mantras at Airtable, or Airtable thinks it needs a different mantra. Who knows… Here is what Airplane says, for example: Write workflows in code. Stop fiddling with drag-and-drop UIs and learning proprietary DSLs. Write sophisticated workflows using if, else, for, and all the normal coding constructs you know and love.
That’s unlike what Airtable has been doing up till now.
A use-case for AI made me right curious because I would like to see that… Tell Airtable take my CSV and send send invitations to members …
That would be nice … Airtable, take the CSV, upload it to Sales table and create accounting entries Acconting table and prepare invoices and send them out by email. Cool.
I can see the devs there bringing a lot of complimentary skills to Airtable interfaces. Especially if they (dare I say it) put out an SDK for building Interface components.
Imagine a marketplace for interface components? I already have a handful I’d want to build…
Marketplaces for proprietary design architectures generally do not succeed.
Airtable made a fundamental mistake with Interfaces - it believed it could build the perfect no-code approach that would satisfy all rendering requirements. It did the same for its charting and data visual extensions.
Charts, forms, reporting - all of it has underscored this bad idea. They should have stayed the course with Interfaces when they first envisioned views based on open Web standards in late 2019. They opted for the opposite, likely influenced by the Bayes acquisition.
Interesting. I have never seen Airplane.
I have looked at their website, watched a video and I am very confused 
So basically abstraction around using SQL query and abstraction around building table?
Why wouldn’t I just use React Table and queries in Server Components? Yes there would be a bit more boiler plate around setting up connections to the DB
The seem to have ton of prebuilt data connectors Postgres, Snowflake, Mongo… Airtable is not one of them!
Looks like a well designed product, but I am really not clear when I would use it.
What is Airtable going to do with it?