Launched my iOS game as Open Source - <AUTHOR> http://github.com/seanhess/wizardwar#wizardwar <comment><USER2> "The final work shall not compete directly with Wizard War, in any mobile app store or on the web." \- This line is too restrictive and keeps your custom license from being an open source license. The point of free and open source software is it protects your freedom to modify and distribute the software for any purpose.

Imagine if Microsoft Word distributed itself as "open source", with the exception that one can't use that source to compete with Word. You wouldn't really be able to do much with it, would you? Even simply distributing it to your friends would technically be "competing" with Word.

<comment><AUTHOR> We are mainly distributing the source code so people can learn from it, but I would be happy if they used the code or even the artwork to make a substantially different game. I just don't want someone to just slap a different name on it and out-market us or something.

How could I word the license to give people more leeway while still preserving that intention?

<comment><USER3> "Open source" has a very well-defined, widely accepted meaning. Part of this is that an open source license cannot restrict the purpose for which the code is used. This isn't making a value judgement on such licenses: it's just defining "open source".

If you actually want your code to be open source, you should use one of the common licenses like the GPL or BSD license; this makes life easier both for you and people who would use your code. Since these licenses are common, people know exactly how they work and are willing to trust them. A custom license like yours seems much riskier to use: for example, how is "competes with" defined?

You can license the code and the artistic assets separately. This is what Id does with its old Quake engines. This way the code is still open source in the strictest sense of the word, but somebody couldn't just resell your game as- is.

You can license the assets under one of the Creative Commons licenses. These have well-defined and well-understood terms that you can mix and match to find something that suits your needs.

<comment><USER4> This comment needs more attention.

Assets licensed with CC (use the one that requires permission)

Code licensed with real Open Source (example: MIT license)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> We will eventually monitize this app through in app purchases, but decided to launch it open source. I'm not sure we got the license right, but it seems like we can provide the source as an example to the community without losing too much.

Obviously it would be cool if other people got involved in keeping the game content fresh, but that might not be realistic.

I think it would be cool if more commercial applications were open source for learning purposes, but I know that might not be feasible for most products.

<comment><AUTHOR> For those of you that have tried the game: any feedback? Would you pay for an extended single player game, unlockable wizards with a custom special spell, or some kind of supporter program that gives you early access to a forum and betas?

<comment><USER5> In the future, you should avoid committing your Parse application id and client key publicly... You don't want other dev's piggybacking on your account quota, though it's not really a security risk by itself. Considering it's already there, make sure you've implemented Class-level security to protect your data. [https://www.parse.com/docs/data#security- classes](https://www.parse.com/docs/data#security-classes)

<comment><AUTHOR> You're only looking at the dev key. I have a separate "secret" branch with the production keys for everything. It hits a different firebase too.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> There is a player roaming the multiplayer arena named "Indefeatable" (sic) who appears to be able to cast the heal spell without any delay.

Perhaps an unintended consequence of allowing everyone to compile their own version of a multiplayer game.

(Defeating him/her was satisfying.)

</comment><comment><USER7> This is great and I hope more app developers follow suit!

</comment><comment><USER8> I don't see the problem here. The way I understand open source is that the source is available and can be distributed forward.

I think it's bit troubling to define Open Source as "Free" software as defined by GPL. That's very misleading as it is very far from free since you are not free to distribute any parts of your software with any other license.

GPL is like legal virus.

Thumbs up for the OP. Good, altruistic effort.

<comment><USER9> So sad for you that one must follow the license. I guess it would be more "free" if people where allowed to ignore copyright all out. Music, and music software particularly.

Since people try to say that I live in a free country, I guess I should also be allowed kill anyone, torture, and do anything I would like to. How dare they have laws and at the same time say that I am free. Its so misleading. Truly troubling how they define it as "Free".

I guess in your world, BSD is also a virus, demanding that all advertising materials must include the acknowledgement that: This product includes software developed by the <organization>.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> Cool project. Thank you!

BTW, I create srcmap database for this project @

[http://www.srcmap.org/s/sl.htm#c=P&d=/proj_src/wizardwar/&p=...](http://www.srcmap.org/s/sl.htm#c=P&d=/proj_src/wizardwar/&p=wizardwar.slk)

Let's see how many users will hit the server in next couple of day or so. (finger crossing...)

</comment><comment><USER11> Thanks for giving the source code to the community!

For those that want to test the game but don't want to set it up in xcode, i compiled the code and uploaded to app.io: [https://app.io/qj4Ofv](https://app.io/qj4Ofv)

</comment><comment><USER12> I love this idea. You can still get to make money and the rest of us get to benefit and contribute. I like this particularly for games, where the content can not be as easily duplicated as say a business app. Creativity and all that.

</comment><comment><USER13> This is a great idea especially if you can monetize it successfully. I would buy it just go support it.

</comment><comment><USER14> I am just learning Objective C as well, and this is very helpful! Thanks!

</comment><comment><USER15> as someone learning iOS development - thank you</comment>


Google Reader: A Product vs. A Symbol - <AUTHOR> http://clayallsopp.com/posts/google-reader-product-vs-symbol <comment><USER2> The post misses the role Reader played in the ecosystem. It may have been intended as a content discovery app, but it actually became a content creation tool.

When I was a journalist, Reader was my main research tool. I didn't care about what was trending. I wanted to find things before they became trends. I subscribed to lots of obscure blogs and publications, and Reader allowed me to skim them very quickly for items of possible importance. I was also able to go back and search all of my feeds for interesting material.

I think this article sums it best: Killing Google Reader is like killing the bees - [http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2013/mar/15/google...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/blog/2013/mar/15/google- reader-killing-mistake)

<comment><USER3> THIS! A thousand times this!

By the time it hits facebook and twitter, it's already old news. I have hundreds of feeds subscribed in Reader so I can find it before everybody else.

<comment><USER4> I completely forgot about how back in the day that Google Reader had sharing features, I would feel how non-reader users on facebook were days behind on what my friends had already shared and discussed on Google Reader.

And the discussions had better quality too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't fully agree:

> Then came Flipboard, Prismatic, and all the other content discovery > platforms that became smarter than just Google Reader in lipstick.

Lots of people don't want content discovery or anything smart. They just want a list of articles from feeds.

> Google Reader, the product, seems to be a textbook example of how an > incumbent failed to head where the puck was going.

Reader didn't join the party on all the new-and-social stuff, and just stayed a usable product in the form it promised when it started. For me, personally, that was not a failure, but a great thing.

<comment><USER3> Agreed. I generally dislike most suggestions as they tend to pick the wrong reasons for suggesting them. I'd rather find my own content via the blogs I subscribe to, and following the articles that I like to their sources and going from there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> You may be correct but I like to follow the money. Since it is not a product that is sold, the value must have been in Google learning what we like to read. Google did not learn anything new about our interests from Reader and therefore it had no value.

<comment><USER7> Only a relatively small fraction of the population, mostly highly intelligent, and well informed, curious individuals used Reader (and while I'm on a roll, I'm also extremely handsome LOL) That being said, aside from being an unusual subset of the population which they may or may not have advertising clients for, that sub-population also might be non-monetizable people, adblockers. If I'm an unusual person they can't find advertisers for, and I adblock, GOOG can learn all they want about me, they'll never make a penny.

Sometimes my mythtv commercial auto-skipper will miss or whatever and I'll be stuck watching TV commercials, and I'm occasionally all WTF I'm not part of this culture anymore. I mean I still live here, but advertising just gets weird if you avoid it for awhile and then jump in the deep end. Ditto if I'm stuck on a computer without adblocking. You guys in my former culture which I'm no longer part of, are just weird.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> "I get why Google finally killed Reader. It was essentially free infrastructure and storage for an ecosystem of apps that generated more value (both financial and intangible) than the product itself."

That's not what I see at all.

From day 1 when I switched from "feedonfeeds" which is basically a self hosted simple web based reader to using Reader many years ago, I always thought the purpose of Reader was for the mighty GOOG to associate my gmail address and web search history and all that stuff with a list of sites I follow so as to sell better advertising. And better spamming of other people with similar interests. So someone reading aaronsons quantum physics blog might get ammo spam because I (and probably many others) read both aaronsons and esr's blog.

The true meaning of the abandonment of RSS by GOOG is they're shrinking their "big data" source collection, not growing it, maybe for the first time ever. They've grown their data gathering for so many years, weird stuff like streetview vans gathering wifi SSIDs, over 100 spam emails per day for me even when I no longer use email as a major communications tool, etc. But now they're in a pruning mode, gathering less data not more. That inflection point is the "REAL" story. Maybe eventually they'll inevitably roll back to just spidering the net for search. Or they'll give up on all the "big data" stuff and pivot 100% into phones. Could happen?

Another interpretation is reader was for infovores or whatever I am. People who think learning about the world is watching Laverne and Shirly reruns on old fashioned broadcast TV are very profitable to advertise to, but they don't/didn't use Reader. And people like me use adblock. So I'm not very profitable for GOOG. For example, people who won't see our ads, do read both aaronsons blog and esrs blog which is kinda interesting, but who cares, they adblock anyway so no way to spam them. Its more profitable to track and spam the old fashioned TV watchers.

</comment><comment><USER8> > Today, news and blog content is relatively open and parseable because of RSS > and Google Reader's leverage

Isn't the other way around? The way I remembered it, having a blog was the hottest thing, and RSS is the solution that bring the blogs to the customer. Desktop clients are spawning everywhere (like Twitter clients a couple of years ago). It was a big when Firefox added support for RSS, and then my favorite email client back then, Thunderbird also had RSS reader built-in.

IMHO, it was the rise of _Web 2.0_ (oh boy, that term sounds so corny now) and uncontested Google domination of the web that made Google Reader _the_ RSS client.

The article is right about one thing though, it's Flipboard and other "smart" reader apps killed Google Reader. Had there not been so much innovation on the reading side of things, Google could have (and probably would have) revitalised Reader like they did Gmail.

<comment><USER9> > IMHO, it was the rise of _Web 2.0_ (oh boy, that term sounds so corny now) > and uncontested Google domination of the web that made Google Reader the RSS > client.

This is true. I could use Reader on my desktop, then use my Google account to sync other RSS readers on other devices. Now that I think about it, Google Reader might be the first time I consciously delegated a service to Google for use by other apps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I was under the impression that symbolism was a construct of fiction, used by the author to make larger overarching points via the use of more tangible agents.

It's confusing when writers apply this concept to the real world; it seems like they push the notion that there's some great narrative in the real world.

</comment><comment><USER11> I'm so tired of these blog posts where people completely miss the point of RSS, Google Reader and what the combination of the two means/meant.

</comment><comment><USER12> RSS is like client side Javascript. There may be better solutions but it is the only one that is truly open and free.

All these twitter facebook whatever are not based on open protocols to share information freely and anonymously.

Twitter or facebook can kill any app that relies on its API. and Yet some people keep cheering at the death of RSS , these people deserve the distopyan future that's coming.</comment>


Increasing the Windows 10 performance by these tips and tricks - <AUTHOR> https://whooptous.com/how-to-speed-up-windows-10-pc-performance/ <comment><USER2> Very useful, a bit more specific here:

[https://gist.github.com/andygock/6b3a18bc4918e68e10829b35e94...](https://gist.github.com/andygock/6b3a18bc4918e68e10829b35e94eaeb7)

About the ccleaner comment in this article, just mind belongs now to mcaffee, no longer piritform.

</comment><comment> lone-commenter Bad advice. Do not ever let CCleaner touch your system.</comment>


Show HN: Geobird – Yet another location-first social network +More +AMA - <AUTHOR> https://www.geobird.com <comment><AUTHOR> Hi everyone,

 _About Geobird;_

From the viewpoint of a sharer, everything you share are currently public, it's there to be discovered, you share them with the world and people nearby.

From the viewpoint of an explorer, someone who wants to know more about the world, you can pan to any part of the world, see what's happening in that location, what people are sharing.

From the viewpoint of a local person, you have the opportunity to reach people nearby, whether it's a cause, or just a happy moment you want to share, similarly, you get notifications from nearby.

From the viewpoint of an introvert, at the "More" section there are native social features for movies, tvshows and books, I'm personally very fond of the tvshows feature

I tried to shape Geobird for many use cases, at this point, only time and feedback will tell whether I was successful.

 _About the Journey;_

Started 4 years ago, I'm not proud of how long it has been, launched in the 1.5th year, fixed bugs, improved the backend significantly with first users until the 2nd year, launched the mobile apps around the 3rd year and here we are, a lot of iterations later (originally intended 4 years to be 6 months, lol)

Initially intended building geobird with a team, tried to recruit a designer friend I knew, failed, decided to build a prototype myself and extend the team later on, I'm glad I initially failed being a company (of people), if I built geobird at a company scale, my funds would be almost exhausted by now - <USER2> being a one person operation, I can keep on failing for years, keep the product alive forever and only grow in case widespread adoption ever happens

I would appreciate any kind of feedback and criticism, \+ Ask me anything,

Kaan

<comment><USER3> I can't tell but if you go to a member page, if they have a lot of images do they show up like the front page?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes, here is my profile: [https://www.geobird.com/gg](https://www.geobird.com/gg)

And here is the user with the most photos: [https://www.geobird.com/GradinaruCtin](https://www.geobird.com/GradinaruCtin)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> you should advertise under social network worldwide on adwords. You can probably get some traffic pretty cheap around the world and that will add a steady flow of users.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks a lot for the suggestion, I will try that and see how it goes</comment></comment>


Bowtie - An ultrafast memory-efficient short read aligner for DNA sequencing - <AUTHOR> http://bowtie-bio.sourceforge.net/index.shtml

<comment><USER2> Another implementation of the Burrows-Wheeler transform is BWA, by the same folks who made Maq. Both Bowtie and BWA can output SAM and/or BAM (binary SAM), which is the file format used by the 1000 Genomes project and the (highly useful) GATK.

</comment><comment><USER3> Thanks for introducing me to the Burrows-Wheeler transform, used by Bowtie. That's way cool. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transfo...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burrows%E2%80%93Wheeler_transform)</comment>


NSA chief Alexander and the embarrassing PR video - <AUTHOR> http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzpolitik/nsa-chef-fordert-stopp-der-snowden-veroeffentlichungen-a-930065.html

<comment><USER2> The video: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6Kc5X...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6Kc5Xvr24Aw)

You can quite clearly tell that this video was made for our congress-critters. Personally I have some concerns about the US Defense Department doing PR work, especially since he's throwing the words 'terrorists' and 'IP theft' around quite a bit.

I would love to hear the General's opinion on the prevalence of parallel construction and restricting NSA-sourced intelligence to DOD networks, with no exceptions made for transfer of intelligence to any other agency (especially the Justice Department).

The General touches on defensive operations and securing our infrastructure, however he rarely goes over our offensive capabilities and how often they're used against our adversaries. Furthermore there are the issues of interfering with security standards processes to intentionally weaken them, harboring exploits instead of pressuring vendors to fix them, and public oversight over the spying programs rather than secret oversight.</comment>


Upcoming HDMI 2.1 Features - <AUTHOR> http://hdmiforum.org/hdmi-forum-releases-version-2-1-hdmi-specification/ <comment><USER2> Finally we'll be able to switch between inputs without a 3-second delay! This is one of my dream technology scenarios.

<comment><USER3> QMS is unlikely to help with that. It appears to be targeted at allowing a single device to vary its refresh rate or resolution without requiring a complete disconnect/reconnect cycle.

The delay you're seeing is more likely caused by HDCP hand shaking and key negotiation. Depending on your situation, there are external switchers that handle key caching so you can switch cleanly - complete overkill for personal user though as they are not cheap.

<comment><USER4> Wait, so slow HDMI switch times are caused by DRM?

<comment><USER5> As a rule, _anything_ your modern TV setup does that seems frail or way too slow is about DRM :(

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> > Supporting the 48Gbps bandwidth is the new Ultra High Speed HDMI Cable. The > cable ensures high-bandwidth dependent features are delivered including > uncompressed 8K video with HDR.

This is interesting, because I've seen several companies promoting "visually lossless" compression (which is apparently a euphemism for lossy compression that the vendor doesn't think you'll notice) to reduce bandwidth requirements for cabled 8K video transmission. Does this represent some kind of defeat for them, or were they targeting applications where Ultra High Speed HDMI wasn't going to be realistic in the first place (e.g. the various systems that transmit video over UTP cable)?

Also, does anyone know how USB 3.1 SuperSpeed+ cables stack up? Obviously they're specified for 10Gbps for USB devices, but that's in the context of USB's requirements for the attached transceivers, so I'm not sure what it implies about the performance of the cable itself.

<comment><USER7> At these kinds of speeds, why would we use it for just video? We could make server interconnects extremely fast.

<comment><USER8> Modern HPC interconnects are already faster than 48Gb/s

<comment><USER9> Those are usually quite expensive. If HDMI requires 48Gb/s capable transceiver chips to be built into every TV, they will get really cheap very fast. It might not be a viable solution in the end, but it could work for some applications.

<comment><USER10> 40 gbps is only Infiniband QDR speeds, you can pick up an adapter for sub-$50 right now.

<comment><USER11> And plug it into what?

<comment><USER10> Your servers?

If you mean switching, you don't need a switch for simply connecting two computers. Presumably that was the use-case supported by "HDMI-as-network- layer".

If you watch around, you can get Mellanox Voltaire rack switches for $200 or less. QDR gear is "obsolete" and often surplused at very attractive prices. Everyone else has moved onto FDR or EDR speeds.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Could anyone provide a guess as to how "quick frame transport" works?

As someone who likes games the variable frame rate seems like one of the best things in here. I wonder if it would be possible to implement in the current consoles.

I hope the new products announced at CES support this.

<comment><USER13> I read somewhere that the adaptive response rate will work like Nvidia g sync. A 4K, hdr 75 inch gaming monitor without frame rate hiccups is quite an exciting prospect!

<comment><USER12> Right. My understanding is it's basically the same as G sync or whatever the AMD name for it is.

I'm kind of curious to see what a game running at say, 50 frames per second, looks like if the frame pacing is uneven. I imagine it looks worse than 50 frames per second with even frame pacing but better than 50 frames per second with glitches because you're supposed to be outputting 60.

<comment><USER14> GSync and AMD Freesync do the same thing, but not in the same way. Freesync is just a brand name for DisplayPort's Adaptive Framerate specification. GSync is proprietary, and requires the display manufacturer to add special hardware into the unit that increases costs a bit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Hasn't the world just agreed on migrating to USB-C for everything?

<comment><USER16> USB 3.2 (and currently USB-C from it) doesn't support the 48GBps that HDMI 2.1 and 32GBps that display port 1.4 call for. USB supports a max of 20 GBps at currently. It's possible you can get more bandwidth using an alternate mode in the connector, but the spec says you can only guarantee up to the 20GBps over those modes currently. This means the higher resolutions and higher bitdepths (10bit, HDR, etc) may not be possible to push over the connector.

This is why Thunderbolt 3 requires special active cables to get the additional bandwidth by amplifying the signal to help get around the bandwidth limitation of the connector in a passive configuration.

<comment><USER17> > It's possible you can get more bandwidth using an alternate mode in the > connector, but the spec says you can only guarantee up to the 20GBps over > those modes currently.

20Gbps per what? One lane? Two lanes? I haven't heard of this, where can I find more info?

(If it's actually 20GBps with a capital B then we're nowhere close.)

> This is why Thunderbolt 3 requires special active cables

> the 48GBps that HDMI 2.1 and 32GBps that display port 1.4 call for

This part isn't right.

Thunderbolt 3 can run 40Gbps over short passive cables. And that's bidirectional. It's the equivalent of 80Gbps for a display cable.

Displayport 1.4, at 8.1Gbps per lane, is actually slower than USB 3.1 Gen 2.

HDMI2.1, at 12Gbps per lane, is slightly faster but still well short of thunderbolt.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Why would anyone use HDMI instead of DisplayPort? It is cheaper to make?

<comment><USER19> Because native plain DisplayPort is only available on HP and some other Windows laptops (not sure about the state of the desktop GPU market), and it's _rare_ as input.

The rest of the market - consumer Windows laptops, Apple pre-USB-C-crap-series laptops, gaming consoles, cable TV boxes, other home theater stuff on source side, as well as TVs and projectors on the sink side - speaks HDMI only.

<comment><USER20> > Apple pre-USB-C-crap-series laptops

Totally incorrect. Before USB-C, there was Thunderbolt 1&2, which was over a Mini-DisplayPort connector.

<comment><USER21> Display port connector, but only PCIe signaling, no other protocols implemented.

<comment><USER22> Except for Displayport. Seeing, as you know, half of HN has MBPs they plug into DP'd desktop monitors, including me.

<comment><USER21> No, the ports on the Macbook are PCIe + Displayport. The Apple displays are PCIe only. The parent was specifically talking about Thunderbolt. You aren't using anything Thunderbolt when you plug into a DP monitor.

<comment><USER22> I've plugged non-Thunderbolt laptops into Apple Cinema displays as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Here's a link to the specification info page and Q&A rather than the press release: [https://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/hdmi_2_1/](https://www.hdmi.org/manufacturer/hdmi_2_1/)

A copy of the presentation from the announcement can also be found here: [https://www.hdmi.org/download/hdmi_2_1/HDMIForum2.1NovReleas...](https://www.hdmi.org/download/hdmi_2_1/HDMIForum2.1NovReleasePresentation_EN.pdf)

</comment><comment><USER23> can this do 2x 4K @90Hz? e.g. for VR headsets.

<comment><USER24> What VR headsets are you using and with what video card? Me thinks we are a ways away from that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Apple, please bring back the HDMI port.

<comment><USER26> No thanks. DP over usb-c is way better for all laptops.

<comment><USER25> Man, I'm so over dongles.

For the graphics cards that these laptops have... they aren't like super powerful. I can't, for example, game at 60 FPS on a 4k Monitor on a MacBook Pro. So the use case for needing more than 60 FPS, or more than a 4k display, seems more like an edge case to me.

Mostly what I want is to be able to plug into projectors when I'm with a client so I can share a pitch deck. Instead... I've got this massive USB-C to VGA / USB dongle, and another for USB-C to HDMI, and yet another for USB-C to Thunderbolt for my work monitor. Anywhere I go I've gotta lug around a laptop bag now, and it's full of dongles.

The OLD 15" MBPs were perfect. Good mix of ubiquitous ports, and Apple's proprietary Thunderbolt ports. I have yet to find anything other than dongles that use USB-C. Just like I have yet to find anything other than Apple Thunderbolt Displays that actually use Thunderbolt.

<comment><USER27> I was in the same boat when I was on my rMBP with its thunderbolt ports but now with usb-c, I just carry this one: [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KV5332A/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_onqj...](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01KV5332A/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_onqjAbYAMAREE)</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Good Engineer, Bad Engineer - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@KevinBeauregard/good-engineer-bad-engineer-c6e2dea98b9b <comment><USER2> Interesting.

This article makes me a little scared because I don't take initiative.

I used to try to build new things people wanted (at work) and I thought would make good additions: nope.

Now I just wait until people tell me what to code because it is a waste of time to build what I see is missing and needed when I am nothing more than the monkey.

This sounds really negative, but it kind of is. It is sort of demoralizing and I am not sure what I am doing wrong.

<comment><AUTHOR> Taking initiative doesn't necessarily mean solving problems with code first. It sounds like you need to determine how you can "sell" these new feature or product ideas to the company at large - how will the company save (or make) money if you implement them? Building the right relationships within your organization is a form of "taking initiative."</comment></comment>


Amazon announces $20 Echo Buttons - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/27/16374906/amazon-echo-buttons-family-games-connected-alexa <comment><AUTHOR> the echo buttons seem potentially very interesting if paired with an API. they could effectively generalize the amazon dash buttons, which let you shop with one press of a physical button.

maybe the buttons will also one day display editable text/images to minimize the need for users to remember what each button does.</comment>


Microsoft Access: The Database Software That Won't Die - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/young-coder/microsoft-access-the-zombie-database-software-that-wont-die-5b09e389c166 <comment><USER3> A number of years ago I was in the Navy and worked in an electronics shop on an aircraft carrier. We were responsible for calibrating and repairing all the test and measurement equipment for the entire ship as well as the squadrons that we carried with us. Easily over 10k individual pieces of equipment, each of which had to be calibrated on a specific schedule. Most of this data was managed centrally, and we sent/received DB updates a couple times a week. However, just managing our workload and operations efficiently required other data which was not part of this database. I had no choice but to build my own solution, and the only real option was MS Access given the barren IT resources available on a deployed aircraft carrier.

But man, was it a fucking lifesaver. Just for one example, we often had to send equipment out to different labs since we didn't have the capability to test them, and shipping stuff required a standard military shipping document with various mundane pieces of information about the stuff being sent. Creating these documents was a tedious process of looking up the data manually and then typing it into a Word file. I just recreated the document as an Access form, with fields that would populate from a query. Creating the shipping documents went from 30-45 mins to essentially the click of a single button.

<comment><USER4> Being able to automate forms can absolutely revolutionize some businesses. Many business owners have no idea the extent to which automation is feasible here. I have seen fully manual paper process (printers/scanners/pen & ink/shredders/etc.) go into 100% digital realm and the impact it had on the business. It really is incredible the difference it makes. The most interesting factor was the fact that now that the inputs are captured in a computer, we can run business rules against those inputs computationally. I.e., prevent generation of forms you would have to otherwise manually revise and resubmit after the fact. Then someone figured out you could start plugging in other business systems to your rules engine and tracking state...

I think it is a fun and compelling challenge to see just how much of the business you can put "on rails" with computers and various integrations. I have some background in semiconductor manufacturing, and the degree of automation I witnessed there got to me in a really deep way. Experiencing a massive factory that can literally run for hours-to-days without a single human inside is something else. I feel a lot of businesses can strive towards similar goals. Being able to fully-automate manufacturing of silicon chips is an incredibly opulent affair, but if you can simply automate a paper-bound business process that is on a hot-path (I.e. used many times a day), it could potentially save a struggling business.

<comment><USER5> As a counterexample it's easy to get this wrong as well. In my EMT career we switched from doing run reports on paper to doing it on the computer. It was a nightmare. No attention to good UI principles had been paid. In the section on "What drugs did you administer?" we had to choose from a scrolling menu of perhaps 100 items for _each_ drug we used (including oxygen which we used on everybody). Simply typing in their names would have been easy, but no. Every data element was like that. A report that took me 20 minutes on paper took 45 minutes on the web version. Classic enterprise software.

Edit: Above was an attempt at digitization while this thread is about form automation. Understood. My point is that there was a lot of automation that _could_ have been employed but wasn't. With that and good UI principles, the org could have made us more efficient. They chose not to because what they really wanted was a searchable database of patients treated so they could get more funding. EMT productivity was never a consideration.

<comment><USER6> I imagine this was partly an attempt at data normalization. If you'd been allowed to type it in they would have had to worry about differences in spelling, capitalization, etc.

I'm not saying the solution they used was a good one mind, but I bet that was part of the motivation to implement it that way

<comment><USER5> I expect you're right, but there are better ways (e.g. autocomplete) to achieve that.

<comment><USER6> Oh most definitely. I didn't want to imply they went about it in an even half reasonable way, just that the motivation of designing the interface like that had nothing to do with optimizing for time spent filling it in

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I have a special place in my heart for Access, its where I first started making money writing software and learned SQL and VB. Its where I really felt like I was making something that solved real world problems for people, quickly at that.

It was actually amazing how far it could scale, you could put a shared MDB file out on a Novell network share and have 30 concurrent users with no server app at all, users just doubled clicked the MDB.

I still think there is a killing to made on a modern day Access "Done Right". DB, Gui framework and printable report generator all in one sharing the same language front to back, top to bottom.

<comment><USER8> Salesforce, the core database/CRUD bit of it if you ignore all the stuff they've purchased and tacked-on in the last few years, is essentially 'Access in the cloud', in terms of the sorts of things you can do and the ease with which you can do it, and how far you can stretch it before it starts to get cumbersome. And yes, they are making a killing.

edit: And if that sounds easy, imagine how you would go about upgrading and patching and extending your access-like cloud platform twice a year without any significant breakage of any of your customers varied and extensive customisations, and without any significant downtime, and keep that up for 20 years. Thats the thing that Salesforce are good at, and not many people appreciate how difficult it is.

<comment><USER9> ServiceNow is a lot easier for admins/developers to use for workflow automation. In my opinion it's a little easier than Salesforce but it could become bloated like Salesforce if it want already. Quickbase is another one I worked with but I was migrating workflows off of it. Quickbase was good for non IT people but not much better than Access or Excel.

<comment><USER10> A lot depends on what is actually implemented on top of these systems. I absolutely loathe servicenow because of multi page multilevel forms with horrible, ugly, no good UX I have to deal with.

<comment><USER9> Yea not the worst UX I've seen but far from the best. They give you enough rope to hang yourself and most companies do. They have a new agent workspace to help improve usability.

I loathe Workday. Performance reviews and taking time off have unneeded steps and comments in weird places. The flat and colorful UI looks nice but it's hard to find stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The reason that both Access and Excel use is so prevalent in corporate "shadow IT" land is because there are many parts of the business that have problems for which only a negative or marginal business-case can be made for IT to solve it (given the "get out of bed" costs of most IT departments). It's a barrier-to-entry problem. Excel and Access are cheap enough and fly under the corporate IT radar (no involvement needed), that these marginal problems can be addressed in a self-serve manner.

I've worked in organisations that have tried to kill these tools off but unless you can lower the cost-to-play or offer a "better" self/serve alternative, you will fail.

<comment><USER12> I don't disagree, but isn't it a sign of much deeper issues if this "Shadow IT" land exists at your company in the first place? Why is it that experienced programmers can't efficiently solve a problem that a business user can handle in Access?

Are they under-staffed? Neck-deep in spaghetti code? Lacking business knowledge and the opportunity to acquire it? Bottle-necked by a lack of business analysts or testers?

I hear about this too often and nobody seems to think it's a major problem. IT departments can have a queue that's 2 years deep and people don't even bat an eye, they just think "Oh, that's how IT works!" And that's not even taking into account all the requests people aren't submitting because they've given up hope of getting any dev time.

<comment><USER13> Agreed, I think it's because developers like to over engineer everything and the managers like to over engineer the processes.

So many of these access excel solutions should be a days worth of work, simple perl cgi scripts with a minimalist UI deployed by rsync. Instead we have to use our super "productive" modern frameworks, split everything into a thousand files (god forbid you embed an sql query in the only place it's called), add unit tests, etc. There's certainly times for the later approach, but most businesses need much more of the former.

So because developers don't have a reasonable platform to pinch off random little projects others step in.

<comment><USER14> "So many of these access excel solutions should be a days worth of work"

I don't know why you think a lot of VBA would be replaced by a little perl. Of course, my perspective has a lot to do with the fact that it was essentially impossible to get a new perl module installed where I used to work.

But developers often don't appreciate the importance of presentation (and other) details in reports for managers. Your reference to "a minimalist UI" is telling.

Even though Access and Excel can be buggy, unstable, and annoying, it doesn't make much sense to use anything else if you are automating a report that was previously assembled by hand in Excel, and needs to match precisely.

And often IT types like to exercise power by gatekeeping - if you aren't doing "real" programming, you don't need a Turing complete solution, so Office ends up being the only option. I've been told that if I can select a list of columns from a dataset, and some filters, by pointing and clicking, that's all I, or my managers, need for reports.

Honestly, I think a lot of people find fulfillment in their work through being the person who can say "no" to people, particularly managers that are theoretically higher ranking. And also by expressing themselves through creative decisions when others fail to specify details. I think that using Office/Access/VBA may be correlated to rejecting the value system of most developers, rather than a technical judgment.

<comment><USER13> > But developers often don't appreciate the importance of presentation (and > other) details in reports for managers. Your reference to "a minimalist UI" > is telling.

We're talking access here, at best it's ugly and at worst you've got a gaudy background image(1) and a color scheme that would give the disability compliance officer a stroke. Throwing in bootstrap or a more minimal css framework is a huge step up in terms of presentation.

> Even though Access and Excel can be buggy, unstable, and annoying, it > doesn't make much sense to use anything else if you are automating a report > that was previously assembled by hand in Excel, and needs to match > precisely.

I'm thinking of scenarios a bit more complex than that. Access apps generally have a few data input screens, multiple users, etc. Not complicated but not as simple as reports.

I'll admit that I do run away from anything to do with reports, but usually that's because they've installed some "easy to use, no developers required" reporting system that the non-developers can't use and makes life 10 times harder for the developers. If I can just write sql to shove data into an html table or excel template (where we can have the best of both worlds) I'm more than happy too.

1\. I actually think of some of these old access programs when I look at windows new built in mail app, who the hell adds a background image?

<comment><USER14> "We're talking access here, at best it's ugly and at worst you've got a gaudy background image(1) and a color scheme that would give the disability compliance officer a stroke. Throwing in bootstrap or a more minimal css framework is a huge step up in terms of presentation."

I'm talking about creating Excel reports based on pulling stuff from (possibly a random assortment of) databases. Where you can use any feature of Excel. Not that the Access application is distributed to people who care what it looks like.

It seems like you can't even imagine a complex report that isn't an interactive application. So I think we're just talking different languages.

Honestly, I was just talking to someone in the organization I work in with the same lack of understanding. He was like "you have a point and click interface that lets you choose some columns from a table and some filters using simple boolean criteria, what else could you (or your manager) want?"

I want the ability to define all the business rules to produce the formatting and munge the data, I guess. And to structure the code in such a way that it's flexible enough to handle major changes. I need regular expressions. I need to run a diff algorithm on text. I need to use XML and REST to talk to SharePoint. I need to scrape information from a system that I only have access to through a web browser.

Basically, I'm using Access/Excel to do what I used to use Qlikview for, or just plain Perl, and it seems to be less of an "impedance mismatch" as people like to say. Also it doesn't cost as much as a car as Qlik licenses did.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> As the author points out, Access fills an interesting niche where Excel isn't quite enough, but a SQL database and all the stuff that goes along with it is way too much. On top of that, it's completely local so you don't have to pay for licenses or worry about data policies. That niche is big enough to sustain Access pretty much indefinitely.

I think the lesson here is that business users more often than not want something that 1) just works, 2) they can actually understand, and 3) doesn't require learning and setting up a bunch of other stuff to maintain or upgrade. It's easy to forget how big of a step up it is from Excel to a SQL-based application (or similar other business needs elsewhere) and how big of a barrier that is.

<comment><USER14> I'm not clear on why you are referring to Access as an alternative to a "SQL based application".

Access's SQL dialect is extremely annoying sometimes, but using SQL is a very significant (if not the most) reason for utilizing it rather than Excel.

I went around and around trying to find a way to query Excel "tables" with SQL or something similar, but eventually gave up. There is something called DAX, but it seems different just to be different, and nothing is orthogonal and logical - particularly external data is not on an equal footing with tables within your spreadsheet.

<comment><USER16> I use DAX in Power BI which I believe shares a common data model with excel.

Dax is powerful but sometimes frustrating. When you need bidirectional relationships you end up making custom measures to keep the whole model performant. Depending on the scale of the problem being looked at it becomes a mess.

But Power BI is the access of dashboard world...

<comment><USER14> Based on my limited experience, Power Pivot has a maddening lack of smooth integration with Excel. Power BI is a separate install, I believe, so not currently an option.

I'm stuck with Office 2013 for the time being and can't upgrade or install anything. If I could use anything, I'd probably prefer to go back to SSRS. Maybe Informatica, or OBIEE or something.

I'm biased by spending so many years writing SQL, but I found it extremely cumbersome to do basic things in DAX even after I figured out how, and haven't seen any obvious advantages. But I do know for a fact that software newer than 2013 adds some crucial features that would make it better.

<comment><USER17> DAX and SQL are qualitatively different languages. They serve different use cases entirely.

DAX is designed solely for analytical queries using dynamic context (so you don't have to code for every user selected filter or relationship dependency in your model.) Its meant to be written once and then used interactively by your users. It has tons of helper functions like time intelligence, iterators and generators ..

SQL is obviously much broader in scope and functionality, but to match the level of built in context driven dynamism of DAX would require a frankly unmaintainable mess.

So yeah if you just need an answer to a single specific analytic query, just write a SQL query.

But if you need to create a measure to show weighted average pricing for any user selected combination of equities, time periods, markets, vendors, and 500 other dimensional attributes - and then create 5 more measures on top of that to show year to date, year over year, performance vs. overall market, simulated demand at a 5% decrease in price, and price excluding large institutional purchases - DAX is your friend.

<comment><USER18> I wonder if this is where Looker succeeded with their modeling language LookML.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I used to work as part of a "Shadow IT Group" within a fortune 50 defense contractor. We built fairly complex solutions within MS Office because we were denied the tools to do the job properly. The most complex program I ever wrote in access was controlling electrical arrangements. This database was synchronized nightly across 3 different domains and would routinely have in excess of 50 concurrent users. I think the largest table had around 500,000 rows. The beauty of development in Office is the price tag and the time from concept to implementation. There was very little we could not accomplish with a combination of Access, Excel and sometimes a little wsh.

</comment><comment><USER20> I used to teach students MS Access, as well as the entire Office Suite.

At the time I questioned the validity of teaching them to use Access, as I was pretty sure that it was little more than a toy program, and would never be used in the wild by proper businesses.

Then at a mate's wedding one of the guests turned out to be a database admin at a large financial institution. I mentioned my opinions on teaching Access to students, and how pointless it was, and he laughed at me.

His response was that he'd often be asked to build a database to do xyz by management, and his reply would normally be something along the lines of...

"Sure, we can get a secure database, that talks to the other systems and does everything you need, with a web interface in a week or so."

Management would give him disapproving stares.

"Or I could knock you up an Access database in a couple of hours that'll do the job."

Management's response - "Yeah, just do that."

</comment><comment><USER21> Is there a modern and/or open alternative to this? E.g a SQLite + electron or local web client thing where you could build a simple inventory or similar _but_ you should also be able to scale it to client server when the need occurs 10 years down.

Note that any number of cloud startups don't count as an alternative to access. When these things start it's as an excel sheet with data that no one will go through the enterprise hassle to get cleared for anywhere but their own hard drive. This needs to sit above excel but still local. You need the entire business case and business value while it's still in a local directory.

<comment><USER22> I think that Open/Libre-Office have options for this. You can also use Access as a front end for another db (odbc) backend pretty easily.

I'd probably do a web app myself, but that's just me. I know a lot of people that cut their programming teeth on Access apps, including distributed ones.

<comment><USER23> OO/LO "Base" is a pile crap in my opinion.

People often develop smallish CRUD apps in MS-Access in two weeks or less. It's up and going without fuss and muss and without fiddling with servers, containers, DBA's, etc.

You have to admire its nimbleness.

Yes, the database "crashes" fairly often, but it's easy to make frequent round-robin-style file-based backups using Windows Scheduler and DOS scripts.

Most databases cannot be properly backed up with file-based techniques because of syncing of internal pointers. But MS-Access's separate "lock-file" based technique somehow facilitates file-based backups.

Such MS-Access apps are far from perfect, but if you factor in everything, they seem to be a net benefit.

 _I 'd probably do a web app myself_

If follow-on maintainers don't know the web framework used, it can be hard to maintain. Web apps are rarely nimble to do without an involved framework on which the developer is familiar with. MS-Access avoids that problem with ubiquity and a light drag-and-drop learning curve. (It did get harder to learn when they went from coordinate-based to an HTML-esque flow engine around 2006.)

Let's face it, desktop GUI IDE's are usually much easier to learn than web stuff. You don't have to deal with the web's lack of state, and CSS/DOM/JS headaches/bugs/inconsistencies.

<comment><USER24> Whats wrong with Base? I haven't used it so I don't have any preconceptions about it.

<comment><USER23> Re: _Whats wrong with Base?_

When I first learned MS-Access, I barely had to read the manual. I could discover most functionality by clicking around. With Base, I had to constantly dig in the manual and _still_ couldn't get it to do many ordinary CRUD idioms.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I'm convinced that Access could replace 90% of the business/enterprise software being written today in 1/3 of the time. It's especially powerful if you use a connector to a real database and just use access for its forms and reporting capabilities

</comment><comment><USER22> While I don't really use Access, I think there's a _LOT_ of power there, even as a basic front end to any other ODBC capable database. And while I'd probably reach for SQLite over Access, there's a lot there to really like.

In the end, it's relatively easy to get started with. As TFA mentions, it's really a great option for Power users. A relatively skilled business person can get up to speed with it quickly enough extending from Excel knowledge.

</comment><comment><USER26> I cut my teeth on dBase II back in the day, and built my first consulting and development company on the back of that, then moving on to Clipper, FoxPro and Clarion and other tools over time. I always managed to skirt around Access whenever it came up in client meetings ("Oh, we have this FREE database thingy that came with our word processing and spreadsheet tools - why don't you use that to write our stock control app??").

It has been many years since I have seen Access, and I thank the database gods for that. Nowadays I run an HR SaaS company, but just yesterday we landed the biggest contract of our fledgling company with THE biggest manufacturer in the UK of a certain household product. All the excitement was sucked out of me when they asked if they could integrate our cloud HR system with their internal job costing & time sheet database... which is written in Access!

</comment><comment><USER27> I remember the first Access version. Wasn't cheap (for my budget at the time) and I got it as a birthday gift. Wasn't my first contact with database (dBase III Plus, anyone?) but came with 5 huge manuals that covered a lot of relational databases, and was where I first heard of normalizations rules.

If it was easy for a teen in the first months with a computer, must be easy nowadays for any non-tech person who doesn't receive enought attention from IT because building a system would cost too much for each sprint/function points/hours.

And it won't die unless things like that change.

<comment><USER28> I started to write with Dbase 1 and 2

<comment><USER29> There was no "dbase 1", it started as "dbase 2" because Ashton Tate didn't want the product to sound premature.

<comment><USER30> To be fair, they probably mean dBase II and dBase III. Although they could mean Vulcan and dBase II, which is less likely. I started my "database" programming career on dBase II in the early 80's and never bumped into Vulcan.

<comment><USER23> dBASE III and dBASE III+ were different enough that they are generally considered two different "big release" products.

I used to automate a lot of grunt work by putting code in dBASE tables. It's real easy to do that. You can make a sophisticated menu system using mostly just tables with code embedded. I was quite productive back then without having to type a lot.

<comment><USER30> I remember when dBase III+ shipped, there were some nice new features though we moved over to Clipper when that launched and completely avoided the "joy" of dBase IV. I did also try out another couple of compilers called Quicksilver and dBXL, but Clipper ate their lunch.

I wrote quite a few tens of thousands of lines of code in Clipper (using the BRIEF editor) all the way up until ~1998. By then I'd more or less switched to VB+SQL Server.

Gotta say I really loved working with Clipper, it was a really nice superset of dBase but had many of it's own specific design features.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I will admit a love/hate for Access. Namely, from years of teaching Microsoft Office as Intro to Computing. Access was always the section that was hard to convince students they'd ever need and worse yet outright made the class logistically harder for Mac users.

I will say, however, Access has SOME benefit to Information Systems education, especially in a general IS class. These students are marketing, accounting, etc. and so Access offers these students a quick dip into the world of DBs to understand how they operate without requiring they set up a local server or import some complex SQL statement.

This is a super niche group though, one that does not warrant much support. If someone were to develop an online Access-themed learning environment that taught those same basics, it would have the exact same benefits without the tangled Office requirement.

<comment><USER32> I wonder how many people became actual programmers due to Access. I feel like MS can't remove it just like you can't remove the second rung of a ladder.

<comment><USER33> Even if MS feels they can't remove it - the fact they haven't made any significant improvements to it (even those to keep it usable on modern computers) means it will die a slow death and leave people stranded - the same way they did with VB6.

For example, the SQL text editor in Access is so broken if you copy and paste tab characters they're displayed as zero-width and break text rendering (if you click+drag to create a text-selection the selection will cover the wrong text) and you usually get a syntax error if you make any changes to the query after pasting it (but if you don't modify it then it's fine). Never mind the lack of syntax-coloring or auto-completion. Microsoft says they are not planning on making any changes to the SQL text editor: [https://access.uservoice.com/forums/319956-access-desktop- ap...](https://access.uservoice.com/forums/319956-access-desktop- application/suggestions/10263849-provide-a-better-sql-editor)

There's also a fun bug where the outermost LEFT OUTER JOIN in a query with 2 or more other joins will fail if the right-hand table has zero rows (but will work if the right-hand table has zero _matching_ rows).

<comment><USER14> I managed to corrupt my database and make all of the code irretrievable just by pasting a line that was too long, if I remember correctly. Luckily I was making daily backups.

I also ran into a bug where if you read a long calculated text field from a view/query through VBA, it corrupts everything after 255 characters, even though you can get the data otherwise through the interface or save it to a table. Googling suggested this problem had existed for 10-15 years.

Also, a lot of times your query will return neither a value _or_ null, but "#error".

And I really hate the way it destroys all your formatting whenever you save a query. Every time I need to change something, I end up copying to a text editor and formatting by hand in order to find whatever error I just introduced.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> When I was 14 or 15, my dad paid me to do work for him over the summer. He was in real estate and wanted to have a file/database entry for each of the floorplans and properties he was selling or building. Because I was so young, I used Access to create a CRUD app of sorts that kept details on all his projects. He used it for years.

It's embarrassing for me to admit how long it took me to make the connections between what I did in Access (and later FileMaker) and MySQL and other database systems.

When I look back, I'm half-annoyed with myself for not just using a better SQL tool, but I'm equally pleased/impressed with what I built as a kid.

Airtable is probably the closest we have to "modern" Access - but I agree with the other comments that point out the value and potential of these types of tools.

<comment><USER35> Young experiences are how you learn, and make a lasting impression! In high school I tinkered with computers a lot. I setup SMB shares, ftp servers, created basic websites, some basic query work. I developed a pretty solid mental model of how "computer systems" work and talk together.

Now that I'm in industry, I'm one of the people building these "shadow IT" solutions. I can clearly see how those late nights paid off.

I also act as a liason between the business and IT at times, and can help bridge the communication gaps.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> This is the question I always wanted to ask, I almost wrote an Ask HN...

 _Who use Microsoft Access in 2019?!_

An obvious case is creating a glorified/enhanced Excel for some specific office tasks, another case is that some applications use ".mdb" backend.

But that's all? _edit: What I 'm interested in is cases of using Access for something other than a specific Excel-like office task - it seems Access is still used for some serious business in many businesses (pun not intended).

Also, if your office does use Access just for Excel-like tasks, but has overused it so much, please comment as well, I'd like to hear your story._

 _Who use Microsoft Access in 2019?_

<comment><USER37> Why would anyone use Access in 2019 when they can use SQLite instead? Is it because Access has a graphical interface?

<comment><USER38> Because the vast majority of Access users have it installed locally on their PC already as part of Office, and have never heard of SQLite. And even if SQLite was installed, you'd also need a different program altogether to actually view or input any data. Access includes the engine, the GUI, the query tools, the form builder in a single program.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Welcome to MS Office, the Operating System in your Operating System.

"About 30,000,000 lines of code make up the current version of Office that we are developing."[1]

[1][https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/macmojo/2006/11/02/its- all-...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/macmojo/2006/11/02/its-all-in-the- numbers/)

</comment><comment><USER40> I think at some point, anyone who used a MS-based operating system at work may have indirectly stumbled upon MS Access.

No matter how better other tools can be nowadays, there's no denying the fact that there are businesses who still have smaller MS Access apps that runs critical business processes.

I have helped a small company (~9-10 years ago) who had an MS-Access based application where the source code was locked as well as the database. Took a while to unlock both the source and the database and up until today, that application is being utilized fully in their operations.

</comment><comment><USER41> The amount of people I work with who use Access who do not understand even the very basics of computing is shocking.

And half my help tickets now are fixing Access files from multiple users trying to use them at once...

<comment><USER42> The point though is that this isn't Access's fault. If Access didn't exist, those people wouldn't be magically replaced by expert DBAs who knew how to set up a perfect solution in Postgres or whatever. They'd be the same people, except hacking together some Rube Goldberg machine in Excel or Google Spreadsheets, with even worse functionality and none of the AD controls that Access at least gives you.

<comment><USER41> I'm not really arguing with the article, just commenting on my experience with the undead. Access is a brilliant piece of work for what it enables. I think it's a little unfortunate it isn't better supported, and that more software isn't built like it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I still use Access from time to time for cleaning up data before importing it into SQL Server. Importing dirty data into Access is so much easier than with SSMS. Once cleaned up, SSMS gladly gobbles up the cleaned data from Access.

</comment><comment><USER44> Ugh, what a completely appropriate topic for the week of halloween. Zombies, nightmares, and a lot of late fucking nights saving people from themselves.

</comment><comment><USER45> Of course Access isn't dead. It's a:

\- widely known

\- sold by a major and trusted (wisely or unwisely) enterprise company

database

\- that was once shipped directly to essentially every end-user on earth when it was bundled with office,

and with

\- an actual GUI designed more or less by people who know how to design GUIs.

who on earth would ever have thought that it would die, in the absence of any replacement with similar properties?!

</comment><comment><USER46> At a previous job an operations analyst built out an Access database because our IT group never got around to helping him build something more robust. It actually worked pretty well.

Once we started getting to scaling issues we imported all the tables into MySQL and had Access use the remote tables that existed in MySQL.

This worked really well. All the forms and various things were in Access and the tables in MySQL and this scaled out pretty well to many 10s of users.

A nice side benefit is that I was able to reuse a lot of that data in an internal web application.

</comment><comment><USER47> I'll put in a vote on behalf of access. I work in a consulting industry and as part of my work I have to track thousands of companies, individuals, tenders, and projects. It became obvious early on that a nice little DB would simplify the work. MS Access was there for me, already installed as part of the minimal software set they make available to us. Months later I offloaded the data to a Postgresql database (elephantsql.com) and continued using Access as a front end using the postgresql ODBC component. It's been perfect, and because all my data is offsite, it goes when I go. I have yet to find a better solution that Access as a front end to a postgresql database hosted elsewhere. To the person who suggested sqllite, I'd respond I'm reasonably technical but have no idea how to do that, so it's no solution to my problem. I used filemaker for a while on Apple. Linux has no GUI database front ends worth the while - Libreoffice Base is a weak substitute for Access. Kexi doesn't work as simply a front end. Excel isn't a database and we spend a lot of time laughing at people who use Excel when a DB is the proper tool. Any SAAS solution is out of the question; having a server dedicated to my/our use at work is out of the question. What's left is Access. Long may it live!

</comment><comment><USER48> This reminds me of a job I had back in the mysts of time (...or more likely around 2003ish).

I was brought into a project where a seniour data scientist was working with MS Access but was runing out of room as it, at the time, had a database size limit of 1Gb on disk and our data set was about 2.5Gb in size.

We could have ported the whole thing to SQLite3, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MSSQL or even Oracle as we had site wide licences available.

Nope. MS Access was the favourite tool of this guy so in MS Access the data had to stay and I had to write code to juggle data between multiple simulataniously connect databases on a single machine.

This taught me a lot about how scienitst and accademics approach software engineering. My boss was both brilliant and really dum at the same time. He just wanted to get from A-to-B as "simply" as possible. He wasn't interested maintainablitly or assethics.

To this day the whole business still brings me out in a cold sweat of cognative disonance because on some level I know he may have had a point but on the other hand... I STILL have the flatspot that work gave me on my forehead from all the pointless wall banging involved.

I still beleive his work saved the company involved millions if not billions over years since it was presented. (...and I have never accepted another contract involving VBA or other Microsoft technologies since.)

</comment><comment><USER49> I work for a small finance firm. Before I joined everything was maintained ad- hoc in spreadsheets with no defined structure or consistency. I developed an Access database that now acts as our data warehouse and reporting engine. We are talking here about tens of thousands of rows of data not millions. Access has forms that allow non-technical users easy access. SQL queries can run more complicated reports. Excel can also easily import Access queries and tables.

Programmers often don't understand that Excel and Access are valuable because you don't need a programmer, simply a professional with some technical knowledge. Developing a fully-fledged solution would slow you down and increase your developer headcount by 1. If any modifications need to be made you could waiting weeks for an IT/Developer team to react. IT often acts as a blocker for us trying to get work done with limited data sets.

There is nothing else quite like Access on the market. Air table is but a toy for those of us in business that need a serious tool that can integrate with Excel and has aggregate and SQL querying capabilities.

</comment><comment><USER50> I've just been teaching some basics of DB to high school students; wanting to introduce the concepts of tables, forms, reports and queries, but without need to know too much technical stuff, administration etc. Access should have been perfect (I hadn't used it previously, but have programmed, used and administered a number of 'real' DB systems), but it just didn't make sense to me. I'm sure I could have learned it, but the workflow just wasn't obvious. As well as being ugly as hell. So I went looking for alternatives, and they're thin on the ground.

Went with Zoho Creator in the end, but even some of the concepts in that aren't intuitive (it treats forms and tables as the same thing).

Having done quite a few things with anvil.works in recent times as a 'modern Delphi' I'm left wondering when the 'modern Access' will arrive.

</comment><comment><USER51> > a special crowd that's rarely targeted these days: technical people who > aren't serious coders

Flash had a bit of this too, especially in the ActionScript 1 days - <USER2> from a design rather than a business background. So too did every 8-bit micro that booted into an adequate BASIC. It's a shame that we've largely lost this.

</comment><comment><USER52> My first proper dev job was in a call center.

When I started, they used Microsoft Access almost exclusively. They would put an MDB file on a shared network drive and every agent would open it to input caller data via the forms. Maybe 100 people with the same MDB open. Mental. No backups, lots of (data) corruption!

</comment><comment><USER53> I was once (or maybe still am) one of these power users. Started out with writing VBA macro's in excel to automate some work, probably created some monstrosities in excel. Then migrated over to MS Access and eventually taught myself proper (MS-)SQL which I have been developing in for over 9 years.

One of my crutches is exactly that, that SQL is more or less the only language I have mastered and when I while I feel like I am skilled enough to develop complex databases, I am always lost at creating a proper frontend for end- users. Quite often I will resort to MS Access as a light frontend (holding no data and minimal coding), just a bunch of forms.

Does anyone know an alternative to this? If I just want some forms but don't want to dive into web-based applications, what alternatives to access exist?

<comment><USER54> If you don't need it to be on the web, Python + Sqlite isn't too bad. Then a GUI like pyqt could do the trick (with UI designed in Qt designer). It still requires some coding, though.

If you need it to be on the web, php + Mysql is probably one of the easiest to learn. The cool kids might have moved to something else, like node or django, though. It also requires learning done basic HTML, but the complexity is reasonable.

<comment><USER53> I've dabbled a bit in Python here and there and indeed I feel this is most likely the route I will take, before web (as this is not a requirement for me as of now).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I think Microsoft Access has a lot in common with Javascript. Both are Lovecraftian horrors that no sane person would (clean-sheet) design in their current form. Both derive their ubiquity from having been the only or nearly the only option in their domain. Javascript being the only way to write web- native programs and already there in the browser, and Access being the only database available to users without admin rights on their computers and already there in the Microsoft Office suite. Both are tragedies of opportunity cost for the history of computing by pre-empting or delaying the emergence of any replacement built on superior technical foundations.

</comment><comment><USER56> I, too, still have solutions in use as LOB apps based on Access. I have looked at other tools, being an officionado of Python, I started there. Got sidelined/sidetracked by Django, came back around to plain Python 3. Then I have to pick a GUI, currently playing with QT4, then get the DB connection working, hopefully against MySQL/MariaDB so I can have the solution multi- platformed... And so on.

I already have my annual revenue needs met by a service business, this is now all a side-hustle thing, but it has been a slog.

I do appreciate QT's visual Designer app, it makes creating forms more like Access/VB.

</comment><comment><USER57> Anyone want to suggest alternates? What's the "whip it up in a few hours" for "power users" today?

<comment><USER58> Google forms + spreadsheet

<comment><USER42> Access is the "too much for Excel, not enough for an RDBMS" solution. If it's too much for Excel, it's way too much for Google Spreadsheets, which is far behind Excel in functionality.

<comment><USER59> My organization recently adopted Office 365. One of the new apps was "PowerApps", a web-based GUI app builder. I popped open an example app inspected a button and, to my horror, I found the program logic was Excel syntax one-liners. When I checked the data binding for the app, it pointed to an XLSX spreadsheet on OneDrive. Time is a flat circle...

<comment><USER60> With 64-bit Excel capable of working with up to 4GB files, it sometimes feels like Excel itself ate/replaced Access for certain classes of business and shadow IT use.

<comment> dr-detroit Only 20 minutes to do a pivot table who needs practical skills when you have MS Office installed and the misplaced trust of your company?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Years ago an acquaintance was running a MICROS POS for his restaurant, and lamented the heavy tax burden the local government levied on him.

I was able to create an external software application (we called it "CookBooks") that would selectively skim off cash transactions (ignoring credit card transactions) from the Access database.

This allowed him to reduce his tax liability and pocket a substantial amount of cash on a nightly basis.

This was in 2002 and I recall that it took no time at all to gain update access to the underlying proprietary Access database powering the MICROS system.

</comment><comment><USER62> I don't get asked about working with Microsoft Access that often, except when it comes to interfacing an online store with a POS or Accounting system.

MYOB Retail Manager, which you will find in many bricks & mortar stores as their POS system (often with multiple registers), uses MS Access as its database.

Why they never switched to SQLite or MSSQL Lite I don't know but it's there, does the job most of the time (except when it corrupts itself) and there's no value in moving away from it, and going all-out online is a big scary change for them.

</comment><comment><USER63> Since I haven't seen anybody mention it yet, another old contender in this class was Lotus Notes/Domino. NoSQL before NoSQL was cool.

I worked with an ex-Lotus guy once, and he always raved about how easy it was to build out LOB apps with it and have a pretty capable little database in a single .nsf file.

IBM has washed their hands of it, but I know of a lot of big corporation, and especially militaries, that are still running applications on top of Notes.

<comment><USER64> I've brought up Notes in the past. My encounter was with a synthetic DNA company that was spread all over the planet; two US states, two European countries and Japan. Notes delivered reliable, distributed databases to all of these sites using marginal hardware, intermittent network connections and without much maintenance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I learned SQL from the Access 95 manual. That was the start of my programming career. My life would have been completely different without it.

<comment><USER66> Wish older books like that was more available online

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> JET should die (or whatever the storage engine is called). But the GUI builder is useful. You can use postgres or whatever as your backend

</comment><comment><USER68> Let's not forget those teams still using FileMaker.

<comment><USER69> I really like FileMaker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER70> Coming from a banking background, I know that Access is heavily used in the financial industry, including Investment Banks.

<comment><USER71> My Bride use to work for one of the big 'third bucket' credit card companies. Someone had discovered the northwinds tutorial database, changed the labels, and reworked the business processes to fit the queries - all tables were left as found. The best part was eventually, after acquisition, they had a directive that all databases must be ported over to Oracle... and some soul got to see the horrors of what was done and convert it.

<comment><USER72> This has to be my favorite story on this topic today. Triumph and tragedy in the same instance - tragedy that the person mentioned didn't learn how to use Access properly and triumph in that the person overcame, adapted, and innovated to find a solution.

The second sentence of your post contains both joy and heartache and - in my opinion - could stand alone as a short story for the tech crowd almost on par with the record holder for shortest short story ever.

These are some of the golden nuggets that I used to read Slashdot for 15 years ago and now find on HN.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> The three characteristics in OP reminds me of PHP. 1) It was aimed at people who aren't that much of a programmer, 2) it made them feel empowered, and 3) it just works in a relatively simple setup.

(I'm posting only because I thought that someone must have mentioned this for sure, but couldn't find one.)

</comment><comment><USER74> Here's a little known fact - the Jet storage engine behind Access is alive and well. It's used by Active Directory and many other products at Microsoft. At my previous company, we built a distributed key-value store on top of it (much like using sqlite in a distributed manner).

</comment><comment><USER75> I once worked with a piece of 3rd party financial software, that I won't name.

We used their reporting functionality to extract data to import to our firms systems. Access was their intermediary data store. SQL Server -> Access -> CSV.

I had to support this, so I was one of only 2 people at the firm that was allowed to have Access installed.

Not necessarily Access's fault, but these reports failed routinely. Ended up with a Python script wrapping the whole process and retrying so I didn't get called at night. probably not Access's fault, but still leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Access is regarded as a toy, even more so than MySQL.

</comment><comment><USER76> Not forgetting FoxPro and dBase & friends!

<comment><USER77> I think Access is more like Paradox, with code and data bundled together (for better or worse), rather than numerous PRG, DBF and index files that have to be "deployed" together.

Yeah, I did a lot of dBase / Clipper back in the mid 80s for rent money while I was in college. Liked the ease of use, but index corruption on a multi user network killed it off. And you have to write code, vs allowing users to accrete stuff on the screen with a GUI.

</comment></comment><comment><USER78> Our project's central database atm is an Excel sheet that different people interact with in different ways, Manually, Using macros and using Python (openpyxl and Pandas). It works well. Would Access be a step up?

</comment><comment><USER79> Reading these comments really brings me back! If I remember correctly, developing a simple project reporting system based on Access, and using forms, was my first foray into professional software development (I had actually trained as a Mech. Eng.) - a career that took me from sleepy Surrey, in the UK, all the way to Silicon Valley! One thing that sticks in my mind is tab ordering of input fields - the difference from an occasional user to those who would use a system heavily every day.

</comment><comment><USER80> Interesting that the pie chart in the article omits Oracle - which was actually the #1 DB in the survey results. Not that I'm a fan of Oracle at all, but it makes me wonder.

<comment><USER81> saw that and it's very glaring. the author should be contacted.

</comment></comment><comment><USER82> One great thing about Access is the graphical query builder. Not only is it easier than writing SQL, you can use it for learning SQL by changing view from graphical to SQL.

</comment><comment><USER83> Access is still in the "Intro to Computing" classes in a bunch of lower level US Colleges. I suppose because they don't want to update their materials.

</comment><comment><USER84> Forms over linked tables from MySQL or Oracle are a perfect use case for Access even in 2019. Initial setup is messy but it can be automated for end users.

</comment><comment><USER85> >Clearly, there are people still interested in Access, even if it's only because they're trying to untangle the mess left for them by a previous generation of hobbyist programmer.

My job function entails extending and maintaining an MS Access database that our small company still uses as its primary tool for data entry and reporting. It started on Access 97, moving up through a few new releases until about 2010, which we stayed on until just this year. It's now working with the O365 edition. It was first developed by someone with no previous experience, referencing a copy of Access 97 for Dummies. I learned on the job just by poking around - which is now, I think, the biggest pain point for how we use the software: how exposed everything is. Prior to this role, our company would contract out for development: we'd come up with a big list of things we want, and it would be done and deployed within a couple week's time, although it usually took many revisions to get right. Now that I am able to do this development work in-house, things go much more smoothly as I also work with the day-to-day processes the tool is used for, and I have a grasp on how systems operate within our office. It's very important to have database tools with a low barrier to entry, so I think there would always be some market for this; where it really shines is its straightforward reporting and form editing capabilities, along with its user-friendly query designer. Being able to generate complex datasets without having to think about SQL (though still being able to write SQL!) is powerful.

(as an aside, I feel that I'm ready to move on from my role, but my abilities with Access don't seem exactly desirable or hireable, and as the article describes, there's always a looming threat of it going away someday. I was given a title of "Database Administrator" from higher-ups who think of Access as some esoteric ability, although gambits for pay raise so far have been fruitless. I see it more like ability in using Excel. I have some experience with MySQL via personal projects and programming in PHP, but I wouldn't call myself a dba if I'm being honest with myself. I feel a little stuck by not having the abilities to match my job title when searching for new positions, and if I'm going to the trouble of getting a new job, I don't want a lateral move with the same compensation. The wise thing to do would be to learn competence in proper database tools. I'm young, without a degree, and any advice would be welcome)

<comment><USER86> If you want to learn to do similar work (CRUD apps that talk to a DB) in "real" languages, then I would recommend learning Ruby on Rails[1] or Django[2]. The overall concepts should be really familiar, because they're similar to the workflow you'd use in Access, but you'll learn web development and a marketable programming language along the way. You'll probably also pick up details about how to structure a database that would be useful for your work in Access. Of the two, I think Rails is easier to get started with, but Python is probably more marketable.

If you want to do a deep-dive into Computer Science and transition to a full- time software role, then you might want to look into Lambda School[3]. I don't have personal experience with them, but several people I trust claim their results are excellent.

[1] [https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html](https://guides.rubyonrails.org/getting_started.html)

[2] [https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/intro/tutorial01/](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/2.2/intro/tutorial01/)

[3] [https://lambdaschool.com/courses/full-stack-web- development](https://lambdaschool.com/courses/full-stack-web-development)

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> In polish high schools, Access is still a part of the computer science curriculum (for those who take CS). It doesn't have to be Access specifically, but it is in 99% of cases. You can't really avoid it, as it's required on the Matura exam. I've heard rumors that some teachers even teach the point and click interface instead of SQL.

<comment><USER35> To be fair, if you're gonna be in access, their SQL query writing interface is a steaming pile of issues. In my experience:

1) You can't do multi-line queries. After executing, it'll smash it all to one line again.

2) You can't add comments. After executing, it'll delete them out.

3) It doesn't do any syntax highlighting.

\----

Years ago I worked for a company who had _tons_ of manufacturing production data. Someone built an interface to query the data - used by just a couple people. Mind you, this isn't Access, it was homebrew software. Eventually word spread about the data you could access, and dozens to hundreds of people got access.

They never got to the top of the priority list to make it multi-user, separate profiles, create permissions on queries, etc.

There was a mandatory 8 hour training session with a test before getting access to the environment. Dev queries were automatically deleted 90 days since last run. On prod, 365 days. This was to reduce clutter. Query names were terse. You had to know people who knew what queries did. Comments were used sparingly. Anyone could edit and view any query available.

I copied a query, made edits, then executed. Got weird results. It took 1.5 days to figure out the parser was messed up! First, line comments using ' were excluded. Next block comments using /* */ were excluded. However, if a macro was called inside a block comment, it was executed.

That was the most frustrating bug I've ever debugged. Literally I'd copy the query, it'd run successfull, I'd comment out a couple returned values, and it'd fall on it's face because of how macros worked.

</comment></comment><comment><USER88> It's hard to beat the ease-of-use of Access for simple data management. I don't see any modern replacement.

</comment><comment><USER89> I find MS Access not as intuitive as the other siblings though. Wish there was a "You Suck at Access" video like this one [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c)]

</comment><comment><USER90> I'm still working on a replacement for a still-in-use a2k distributed database front-end (moved the data to mysql a few years back), it's taking forever, it's a huge project I spent over ten years on, and now another ten year trying to replace it.

</comment><comment><USER91> It feels like th true replacement for Access right now is Excel/Google sheets. Not nearly as versatile, but it serves the same audience. I wish we had a good general purpose widely available Access replacement that's just a level above spreadsheets

</comment><comment><USER92> Any database system that has a 'Repair' function is a liability. Access should be taught as a primer at schools and universities on what not to use. It's the BASIC of databases - considered harmful.

<comment><USER25> Then again, you can use a connector to connect it to MSSQl, MySQl, Oracle and others. And you still have a very powerful tool for reporting, forms, queries etc.

<comment><USER92> Still, the database engine was/is a liability as long as the locking policy and the transaction support messed up your data. As a one-user only system it was fine, however people developed critical, multi-user business systems with this toy engine. It allowed uneducated cowboys to develop systems fast that failed horribly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER93> My first job was to finish building a website that used MS Access as the database. I only learned years later how bad of an idea that was. Guess that's what you get when you hire a programmer for minimum wage.

</comment><comment><USER94> If AirTable worked offline it could stage a little incursion into this space.

</comment><comment><USER95> Try Kexi (Qt, part of Caligra Office, formerly KOffice) and glom (GTK)

</comment><comment><USER96> Would have liked to have read that article, but Medium doesn't want... oh right; "Open Link in Incognito Window". There, I fixed it.

Remind me... why are people publishing on Medium again?

</comment><comment><USER97> Why would it die. Most of the internet is a rehash of MS access.

</comment><comment><USER98> It would be great if we had a SQLite interface for Excel.

That would get us halfway there, and make it easy for companies to use (getting off of excel is a different proposition altogether).

</comment><comment><USER99> What's weird is that they don't address those issues and improve or replace it.

There's nothing in the easy database/UI space at the moment and it has gone unfilled for a long time.

</comment><comment><USER100> access is probably the easiest tool for prototyping a CRUD app

</comment><comment><USER101> _Ahem_

"Hypercard"

Is it actually dead yet?

</comment><comment><USER102> I have not used it in over 10 years but it used to be great back in the day when Excel was not enough but more expensive SQL databases were too much.

</comment><comment><USER103> If you import excel files to access and connect to a db using odbc you can write sql statements combining both.

</comment><comment><USER104> When I was consulting I probably got a call to recover a corrupted Access database at least once a week.

</comment><comment><USER105> There's little that can replace access in one interface/app. Have hopes for airtable. :)

</comment><comment><USER106> Someone should make a modern thing. With SQLite for the files and Python for the code.

</comment><comment><USER107> With the current "low code" hype in mind, i guess access is exactly that..

</comment><comment><USER108> Minecraft? Does he mean Minesweeper? Minecraft Is very alive and very well.

</comment><comment><USER109> Would you all consider Airtable an Access replacement?

</comment><comment><USER110> Hello.

I made my MVP v2 in Access. Currently testing it and getting it checked out by a few founders, then I will release it, for free. Well, almost free, email collection.

It took me 10 months, which is fast considering the Excel version (MVP v1) took me 4 years, but then the Excel version has the whole concept from beginning to end, and there was a lot to learn, still a lot to learn really. The Access version covers only the first 9 steps. What I made was a startup system that guides founders from idea to early traction.

Access was not my first choice. I thought after the Excel version that I would use either a no or low code solution, a RAD tool, or some sort of visual development thing. As you have guessed I am not a programmer. I did dabble in BASIC, well a bit more than dabble, when my dad got me a Speccy. I enjoyed it, there is beauty in logic no matter how Phaedrus cuts it, but it was a means to an end really. From Draw and Beep through to Deluxe Paint 3 and OctaMed, it was about expression. I am not saying programming isn't a form of expression, but it is the long way round to me.

A few years later, I had to learn some Turbo Pascal, in order to make a database I think, talking 24 years ago, so I can't actually remember. But I do remember being bored out of my mind. So, I quit my computing degree. It was strange, I had an Amiga I could make things on. My college had just got some multi-media computers, yet in university, we had these stiff monochrome 486's. They didn't sing, didn't dance, looked awful but they did go a long way. Sheesh Kitkat.

Second time round at university many years later, I had to face programming again, this time it was Java, JavaScript and Object Orientated Delphi. OOD I liked, the other two I tolerated, for it was just a programming module rather than the whole thing.

After I had finished the Excel version, obtained feedback, tweaked and modified this and that, it was onto MVP v2. I looked at a shed-load of stuff, Bubble, Kexi, Lazarus, My Visual Database, Delphi 10.3, App Builder, Zoho Creator, Cross UI, Airtable, to name but a few. There were issues with all of them:

1\. Not enough control and/or functions 2\. Cumbersome and tedious to do anything 3\. A sense of detachment as if I was having an OBE 4\. Database; I don't care about connections, stacks and what-not, just sit in the background, and save stuff. 5\. Process, and output what I tell you to do, and send outputs so they are inputs in other places 6\. Questionable documentation 7\. Customer support non existent, unresponsive or just prone to sending me back to the documentation I checked before hand 8\. Tutorials and lessons showing how to make clones of well-known startups, or rudimentary apps 9\. Holding me and anybody I share it with over a barrel 10\. Unnecessarily complicated

So anyway, I decided fudge it, let me take a look at Access, it's been sat there for years. Many other people have it, although not Mac users. I am not a complete novice when it comes to Access, I know a little about 1,2 and 3 step normalisation, although I didn't strictly stick to it. Yeah I had to learn a bit of SQL and VBA, and any questions I had were already answered countless times on forums, although usage and disagreement of ! and . was annoying.

I was obviously unable to make what I really wanted, but I was able to make something close enough for what I deemed as necessary at this moment in time, in order to at least give a user a taste of what I propose. The minimum part of the MVP had to cut across the board, like a slice of cake, bit of everything.

I got asked a few times why am I using or used Access. I could have mentioned the above list, but the crux of it was, to me it was the tool for the job, with a support network around it, with very few chains and shackles, at a stretch I could do it on my own. I couldn't give a hoot about stacks, dependencies, libraries, etc. The latest languages, scalability, etc, whats that to do with an MVP?

I am proud of what I made. I won't be pulling out my who gives a toss but me violin in a public forum, but it's a tough lonely slog. It was my idea, and I had to use what I could to bring it to some sort of fruition. A small stepping stone in the right direction.

Cheers, Ace.

</comment><comment><USER111> Django admin + sqlite?

</comment><comment><USER112> Is there a mirror of Medium articles? I am stuck at the paywall for this one.

</comment><comment><USER113> > You've completed your member preview for this month, but when you sign up > for a free Medium account, you get one more story.

Literally worse than blogspot in every way.

<comment><USER114> Not really. The Blogger/Blogspot UI is a special case of steaming garbage. It's a heavy-weight, bloated webapp whose primary task is to display a few kilobytes of static text on the screen. I think they should be used as a case study of what can go wrong within a team for a blog engine to look like that.

</comment></comment><comment><USER115> why is microsoft access called microsoft access? because only microsoft has access to it.</comment>