Never write a review of a product or an app when you’re steaming, red-hot angry.
- I’m just assuming someone has said that.
It’s beta, so I know that I shouldn’t complain. Anyone that is trying to do actual work using a beta application should know better. But in my excitement, I thought: Hey, why not try out this blist thing? Here’s the story…..
The Task: Create a simple sitemap and come up with a plan for copy and design for a new version of a web site. The site in question is relatively small, and I could do this in excel in 15-20 minutes.
But I remembered what blist said in their DEMO. They were trying to bridge the gap between excel and databases. People use the former when the latter is more appropriate, and blist is trying to bring databases to the masses. Good enough.
Here are the fields I wanted:
Section Name- Text
Page Name- Text
Copy Needed- PickList yes/no/maybe
Design Needed- PickList yes/no/maybe
Comments- Text
Note: blist does not distinguish between different text lengths, so I didn’t need to specify which type of text field I’d need.
Problem One: Inserting rows.
I barreled through the beginning and got all my site sections and sub pages into the sheet…..and remembered: the home page will now have distinct subpages. So I need to add some new page names under the Home section.
Easy right? Just add some rows before the next section. Okay. How?
In excel, you’d just click on the row and add a new row or rows. Not so in blist. So, I looked around and saw this:
Okay, there we go. I want to insert rows, so I clicked the rows menu item, and there’s the insert icon in the submenu. Except…….
It does nothing. You can click insert all day, and nothing happens. At all.
I sat bewildered. Am I really unable to ADD ROWS? SERIOUSLY?
I must be missing something. So I went back and clicked a row again:
So, let me get this straight: I can "tag" a row. I can delete a row. But under no circumstance am I able to delete a row?
Problem Two: Now What?
Let’s forget the whole row problem for a second and pretend we’ve got a perfect blist. Everything is great. I’m done with it and want to, let’s say….PRINT.
Nope. Not so much. See all those grayed-out icons? Those are things you can’t do. So no printing. No exporting. What’s there is there and you can’t take it with you.
Problem Three: I give up.
Okay, so you can’t print. You can’t export in any way. At least I can just copy what I’ve done in blist and paste it into excel, right? Nope. Strike 3.
Salt In The Wound
Just as I was about to simply copy my screen on notebook paper, I got a final send-off from blist:
That’s right: a completely frozen screen. Thanks.
But it’s a beta!
I know, I know. You’re absolutely right. Betas are inherently buggy, and shouldn’t be counted on to do something like actual work. And I should have looked to see if it allowed me to print, save, insert rows, etc. before trying it out. All absolutely true. I am to blame- not the app- for thinking it would be able to accommodate my task.
For some reason I really wanted blist to work immediately. I thought it was a good idea, but I guess it’s just not ready yet. But I think there’s a larger lesson to be learned. When a company offers a web-based version of an app that we take for granted, we also expect that the core features will be ready from the get-go. Just because a desktop application can be ported to the web does not make it better than the local version.
Back to excel.
