Falling In Love with Making 1-Page Apps

In December 2022 I made my first Google Sheets Add-on.

And now in Q4 2023 I have published a total of 6 add-ons to the Google Workspace Marketplace.

But now a new form has taken hold.

I'm building 1-page Apps on the BetterSheets.co domain

These are featured, at times, in my footer. And mainly sent to my email list, linked to on socials, and at times launched on Product Hunt.

My favorites so far are the

But also I fell in love with weirder ideas too

yes I made a screenshot generator specifically for Google Sheets. Put in a url of your sheet (publicly available via link) and it'll go take a screenshot of it. You might be thinking.. why? I can just take a screenshot myself!

But I, at one point, needed a screenshot while on my phone. Probably posting on Twitter or something. And thought.. well if I could just get the URL.. and use Puppeteer... then boom I got a screenshot.

Yes I had to learn Puppeteer to do this.

And these 1-page apps have allowed me to dive deeper into learning code. Using Ruby on Rails has been marvelous. Injecting Javascript, and AI prompts have made it a breeze to get a format and then replicate it a few times.

As you can see the PDF URL, Embed, and /Copy URL Generators are all a "format" that I can keep going with as long as I know more and more Google Sheet hacks and tricks.

the REGEXMATCH and SPARKLINE generators are specific use cases. In this case I went super niche first, and can go more general as I will soon with a "Formula Generator" that can generate anything.

I have done this before in sheets, with an Add-on called ASA (ask sheets anything) but because that was a "bring your own apikey" it didn't take hold very well for my audience. My audience being very much out of their element when it comes to apikeys and anything technical.

Now the trick will be to corral these 1-page apps into a directory that makes sense.

Originally my /tools page was supposed to be where I put all the tools for Google Sheets users but some are in sheets (OnlySheets), some are for sheets (Spintax), and these 1-page apps are mainly for Google Sheet users but not based in a sheet.

Where they live, what they are made of though... is not important.

What is important is that they are useful. And probably more important, that people can find them and use them.

Even if it exists, but nobody knows about it, then does it really exist?

And in the near future will probably paywall some of these tools for a variety of reasons including their running costs (API access) along with the need for my child's education fund.

Indiehackers gotta eat too!