Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal

Re:Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal by iguana_shine on Thursday February 19, 2026 @07:02PM (#47081682)

There was once a time when tools like Microsoft Access and FileMaker Pro were common. These were a database and custom GUI designed using a drag and drop editor. I don't know whether these apps ever had network server capability or if they were always offline or why they died out. It was a bit before my time

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Re:Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal by tjohns on Thursday February 19, 2026 @07:35PM (#47082028)

FileMarker Pro had a dedicated server product (FileMaker Server) that you could use for multi-user access. Claris still sells it: https://www.claris.com/filemaker/

Microsoft Access was strictly file based. You could drop the .mdb/.accdb file on a SMB share and it would support basic concurrency via lock files. However, you could also swap out the internal database engine (Jet) with anything else via ODBC, so your Access database could connect to a remote Microsoft SQL Server instance - or even MySQL/Postgres.

Back in high school, I even wired up an Access database to give a graphical frontend to an accounting app running on an IBM AS/400 mainframe. ODBC made it easy, and Access itself didn't really care where the data lived.

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Re:Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal by wpm on Thursday February 19, 2026 @08:56PM (#47082699)

I know a dude who runs his business off of FileMaker and even does work for his customers building them FileMaker stuff. He loves it.

I should probably give it a shot.

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Re:Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal by moduspol on Friday February 20, 2026 @12:22PM (#47090886)

How many names do you think they ruled out before they settled on "Filemaker"?

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Re:Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal by CobrastanJorji on Thursday February 19, 2026 @07:29PM (#47081970)

I wonder what the state of workflow engines is these days. Back in the (distant, distant) past, everything seemed to use Lotus Notes. Today, there are oodles of workflow engines of all shapes and sizes, but asides from domain-specific stuff like Salesforce, I hardly hear anyone mention them.

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Re:Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal by j45 on Thursday February 19, 2026 @07:47PM (#47082143)

I helped a legacy Lotus Notes application reincarnate once, and it was impressive how reasonably solid it's ability was to be offline-first, and mobile first, and how fewer sychronization/replication errors there were than I expected.

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Re:Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal by CobrastanJorji on Friday February 20, 2026 @03:25AM (#47085244)

Lotus Notes was doing decentralized apps built with NoSQL databases before either of those things were cool. Mostly because "going online" was potentially quite an undertaking at the time.

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Re:Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal by j45 on Saturday February 21, 2026 @09:46AM (#47101316)

Agreed - Lotus Notes def is an example of a working NoSQL database that scales in relating data as well where other noSQL databases only dream of.

Being offline-first has it's advantages too.

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Re:Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal by shakna on Thursday February 19, 2026 @10:20PM (#47083251)

Salesforce is used well beyond its domain, unfortunately. A lot of BAs love the drag 'n drop design features.

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Re:Show HN: Micasa – track your house from the terminal by harikb on Thursday February 19, 2026 @11:51PM (#47083906)

I’ve lived the Microsoft Access times. The downfall of those tools was the refusal to keep the interface simple. They kept layering on features and UI cruft until they became massive apps pretending to be databases

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