I always had the problem that building HTML pages is really simple now, but trying to save data required hosting it somewhere, and sharing it afterwards was not easy. Over the last few months, I've been building an app called Capsule (it’s also the file extension name) written in Rust with Tauri 2.0 that allows packing an HTML app and its data into a single SQLite file.

The HTML file and any related assets are directly embedded in the database. User data can either be saved as a localStorage key/value store or via a MongoDB-inspired collections API as documents, saved in a table in the file. You can also save other assets, like PDF files or images, directly in the database to keep different documents together. All data can be easily exported to CSV or JSON if needed.

Privacy and security were a big priority for me, so documents cannot do anything out of the box. They don’t have direct access to the file system and they require permission to access the internet. The permission model is still something I’m working to improve. Capsule documents can also use local or remote AI models for document specific AI features.

One downside with this approach is that multiple people working on it will create different copies. To make it possible to merge different copies of the same file, each data entry has a unique UUID and timestamp.

I’m planning to open up the file format specification for the 1.0 version of the app so other apps can read or write Capsule files.

You can try it out in the web preview at https://withcapsule.app/preview with pre-built templates or use any AI provider of your choice to create a custom, Capsule-optimized app by using the following prompt:

"Please read the app wizard instructions at https://withcapsule.app/prompt.txt and help me design an app.“

I’m still working on the file format but there are migrations for each new version, so data should never be lost when using newer versions of the app in the future. Please let me know if you have any ideas or use cases where this might make sense or does not work. [bashtian]

Sheets would regularly get 70+ comment threads across multiple tabs with dozens of contributing teams. As the owner of the sheet, I wanted a way to document the comments to retain traceability on all of the various conversations.

To my surprise, there was no function built into sheets to scrape, count, sort or manage comments at all. I also couldnt find any good third party add-ons to solve the problem. So I built one myself.

I discovered that the Drive API gives you the comment text, author and state, but doesnt give the location of the comment which was crucial. Thankfully, the .xlsx export has xl/threadedComments with the cell reference, timestamp, author, resolved flag and parent ID.

How it runs: JSZip in the browser, no sign-in, nothing uploaded anywhere. I am in the process of having the app verified to be hosted on Google Workspace Marketplace, but in the mean time the tool is available at: https://github.com/bsunter93/commentpulse [bsunter2]