Gallery View & Dashboard Widgets — browse visually, build dashboards without code
Just shipped two features that turn Basevolt from "a database table viewer" into something that actually feels like a product:
Gallery View — records as visual cards 🖼️
Until now, every view in Basevolt was a table. Tables work, but they're terrible for image-heavy data — portfolios, product catalogs, team directories. Gallery View lets you browse records as cards with large images and clean layouts. Think Airtable's Gallery View, but local-first, running directly on your database.
Dashboard Widgets — build your own live dashboard 📊
This is the bigger one. Dashboards used to mean "connect your DB to Metabase and hope it works" or "build a custom dashboard from scratch." Now you can assemble one inside Basevolt with four widget types:
- Chart Widget — Bar, line, or area charts. Sales over time, signups by month, whatever trend you need.
- Metric Widget — Big number display. "Total Users: 1,247" or "MRR: $850." KPIs at a glance.
- Table Widget — Raw data when you need the details. Orders, customers, event logs.
- Text Widget — Titles, descriptions, annotations to organize the layout. Makes the dashboard readable for humans.
Mix and match all four. Drag them around. It's a live dashboard that reads directly from your database — no ETL, no cloud pipeline, no extra tools.
Why this matters (to me anyway):
I've been talking to early users and the feedback was pretty consistent: "I can see my data, but I can't understand my data." Tables show you rows. Dashboards show you meaning. Gallery View shows you context. These two features together close that gap.
Also — this puts Basevolt closer to "lightweight internal tool" territory. Not competing with Retool on complexity, but for the 80% of cases where someone just wants to see their data visually and track a few KPIs, it's getting there.
Question for other IH founders: I know I should be doing marketing right now. But every morning I open my editor and think "just one more feature, then I'll promote it." Building is what I'm good at. Putting myself out there is uncomfortable. For those who've been through this — did you force yourself to stop building and switch to marketing? How did you make that mental shift?
