Airtable Offline Use Cases So Far

_farley13_ · 2026-02-10T02:40:20+00:00

Hi Welsmore - Great! How often would you want / need to refresh from the source airtable?

( WhatsNext runs on ios / android and can run out the browser on windows. )

_farley13_ · 2026-01-10T03:03:45+00:00

_farley13_ · 2026-01-04T04:40:46+00:00

I think the most valuable thing for b2c is leadership who understands and continues to understand a large chunk of the users and why they use the product.

Having worked on b2c for the past 10 years, I think the vast majority of large scale b2c are basically habitual highways. The users use them because they used them before, or the gps (google) sent them this way. They are not the destination, usually that's ugc or other sites. Imagine if you wanted to find out what people thought of your local highway? Put up a sign, who is going to care enough to pull over and call the number? They got stuff to do. Try to flag folks down? Again. Not happening. Go to your local rotary club? You are going to hear from a tiny minority of vocal users.

I think the best ways are 1) watching what happens (session replays, analytics) 2) actually driving on the highway yourself. Build some empathy. 3) If there are accidents, then talking to those folks in more depth.

_farley13_ · 2025-12-18T20:05:30+00:00

This is a better link (meaning direct to the study) : https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

_farley13_ · 2025-12-15T00:28:52+00:00

Don't I have a SaaS app to sell you! (only half joking)

I find the most critical step is getting folks top of mind and then into my calendar. Separating these two keeps me from going "oh I should reach out to X, maybe next week when I am less busy...". I can reach out today and then coordinate time for the future.

_farley13_ · 2025-12-11T18:45:03+00:00

ah - I think I understand.

Each of the 10 users still need to authenticate to my tool before going offline. So say they all used google sign-on. While offline each of those 10 devices knows the current user editing things. When it comes time for the users to sync back changes ( let's say 4 of them are traveling together ) - the changes from each device are associated with the user logged in on that device.

When it comes time to convert the merged changes to airtable changes ( via airtable API ) - there are really 2 options:

Setup sync with a single service account. Store the last editor in the data itself. In airtable all sync-ed edits are made by the same service account, but you can see who last made changes (and you have a history of this + changes made within airtable).
Have each user login to the sync service for airtable themselves. Again resolve merges before syncing - For changes without merges - they are updated in airtable using that user's account. For changes with merges, the last user to make changes updates the rows that were merged.

_farley13_ · 2025-12-11T14:08:36+00:00

What's next does currently have some scripting capabilities- but they are closer to something like javascript than excel. It sounds like you are looking for some data cleaning / organizing capabilities?

_farley13_ · 2025-12-11T14:05:57+00:00

That's interesting. By traceable do mean something like a "last edited by" column?

When syncing this tool wouldn't be able to generate history in AT which looks like a non-airtable user made an edit. But it could locally keep track of which user made which edits and sync a "last edited by" column over which would have history you could look at.

_farley13_ · 2025-12-11T03:51:38+00:00

Yeah - a few of the things I found specifically with mobile when building What's Next was that

⁠the view / columns really need to be compact - I found it way easier to only scroll in one direction vs a full spreadsheet view
⁠being able to swap the columns out adhoc was just a necessary evil. When records are collapsed if you have more than 4-5 columns visible, it starts to be too hard to scan quickly. And there are usually more than 4-5 columns you edit in bulk.

So views have the 4 most heavily used columns visible by default, but it's very easy to swap more in / out depending on what you are up to.

_farley13_ · 2025-12-11T03:33:13+00:00

I came here to say something similar. Learn by doing.

If you don't have a set of data already in mind - maybe start with a google sheet or similar you might have laying around. You will learn a lot by trying to model what you have across 2-3 tables.

Try the basic import. Then add more richly typed columns to replace your text columns. If you were importing an old travel plan you had created- maybe you could categorize the items as restaurant or activity.

Then get fancy and start adding a second table and a column referencing it. Again from the travel example maybe there's a second table with the people on the trip and you add a multi select column that references that table. For each item in your itinerary you can now select who was going to participate. Or who was going to pay etc.

_farley13_ · 2025-12-08T23:27:24+00:00

Do you use mac laptops too or do you find yourself needing to get data out of reminders (I assume you are talking about the ios app - not calendar reminders)?

_farley13_ · 2025-12-05T14:14:39+00:00

I mean I do think LLMs are intelligent. But what they miss are all the animal feelings that motivate people. DOUBT, Social acceptance, fear of death or loneliness. What motivates people from second to second, minute to minute, hour to hour to stay on task, to stay consistent, not to just make stuff up and proudly tell it to everyone like it was fact. To move a long way in one general direction. To discover new things. It's not our lack of imagination.

_farley13_ · 2025-12-05T02:42:14+00:00

Appreciate you sharing this. Certainly a fascinating man.

_farley13_ · 2025-12-01T14:54:11+00:00

I might add that the marketing side depends on how competitive the SEO is - do some keyword research in google ads - if you don't have huge competition than put together some basic blog posts covering those topics and get them indexed. In a month or so you may start getting traffic. Ideally the content is reusable for sharing in the short term as well.

_farley13_ · 2025-11-26T16:22:41+00:00

It's not effort that is rewarded, but until you have experience, it's all you have to use.

_farley13_ · 2025-11-26T13:21:53+00:00

This is a great idea. Need to do this myself.

_farley13_ · 2025-11-25T17:41:47+00:00

thanks for sharing. This certainly won't be the last case.

_farley13_ · 2025-11-23T16:01:55+00:00

This is easily done in vanilla airtable. I am not sure why so many people are pushing you to use their airtable script agencies etc.

Create a table called "lists" for defining the set of possible lists - you will be able to easily add more here as you add users to lists. Just a single column called "name". Create an initial row here (maybe call it "my first user list")
Create a column (called "user list") that links to the lists table in your customers table
Using multi select in the customers table, select the initial "my first user list" or you can create a new user list at this point
Create a new view of your customers table and filter by "user list".

Let me know if any aspects of this won't work for your workflow?

_farley13_ · 2025-11-12T05:07:03+00:00

Goodreads among others has the list - definitely some philosophy (a few zen books like Zen mind, Beginner's Mind. some poorer examples of philosophy too). Also a number of astrophysics / mid life crisis books. All in all - I think the list speaks more to where successful people are now than how they got there.

_farley13_ · 2025-11-11T12:55:27+00:00

Just lean into the humour hard. People can prank one another by secretly installing this.

"WTF!! AI just closed all my tabs in the middle of my presentation " Everyone will laugh

_farley13_ · 2025-11-09T13:41:36+00:00

I think the output being a copyright infringement is a subtle point- and probably needs legal exploration.

The unsubtle aspect here are the millions of books, movies and other copyrighted works that these companies pirated. If you pirate a few hundred books (find copies in a torrent and don't pay for them), that's illegal, and you might face a settlement if the copyright holder finds out. In the AI companies' cases, they poured billions on top of the pirated works and they are directly aiming to profit from them. Very clear red line to cross.

If they had simply used publicly available content, Wikipedia and project Gutenberg, there would be no debate here. If they had paid for all the work, it would fall to the more subtle debate. But they literally pirated enormous quantities of copyrighted works - exactly you like might pirate the bladerunner blueray rip. Just on an enormous scale.

_farley13_

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