Blist, the cloud database application, which we covered back in March when they launched into their public beta, just received a big update yesterday. The update addresses, for the most part, stability and performance issues, but it also includes some new social features as well.
What’s New
Responding to user feedback, the blist team focused on making their application more stabile and faster. Specifically, in two areas where it was too slow – horizontal scrolling and “blist-in-a-blist” (table inside a cell). Prior to the update, those were two of the slowest areas, but now, each has received a noticeable performance boost.
Additionally, two of blist’s social features were also updated – Discovery and the Dashboard. In the Discovery section, there is now a leaderboard showing the most social blist users – that is, who is doing the most sharing of their databases. The goal here seems to be to encourage people to publicly share their data with other blist users instead of making their databases private. On the blist Dashboard, there were some minor improvements – you’ll now see more events and you can even scroll through the past 100. The dashboard’s UI was also tweaked to enhance the flyouts which now give you a quick overview of the user.
blist flyout
However, one of the best improvements in terms of usability is native Excel import. Prior to the update, the only way to import Excel files was to first save them as a .CSV. Now Excel docs can be imported even if they are in .XLS format.
We love to see what’s arguably one of the more useful web applications still doing well. As an alternative to complicated software like Access or Zoho’s database, which requires some knowledge of SQL, blist makes database creation nearly as easy as making a spreadsheet. And anything that makes our lives easier is a good thing.
