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Hypercard's "letting regular people build useful things" ethos lives on in IFTTT, Zapier and Microsoft Flow. In 2019, it's not super useful to many people to be

Hypercard's "letting regular people build useful things" ethos lives on in IFTTT, Zapier and Microsoft Flow. In 2019, it's not super useful to many people to be able to mush together some buttons and textboxes into a desktop UI, but it's fantastically useful to be able to mush together their email, calendar, SMS, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Spotify, Alexa, home automation etc.

rtpg 7y ago
The fact that stuff that used to be on local files is now inside these various services makes it _much harder_ to bootstrap together simple programs I think. Though on the other hand if you leverage some other automation tools you can avoid figuring out how to auth to various systems yourself. You just end up contributing to the "everything is connected by duct tape" nature of modern software
TeMPOraL 7y ago
Sorta, kinda, not quite. That's the problem with SaaS - they take your data, silo it up, and expose through highly limited and tightly controlled APIs. Sure, I can make IFTTT save a copy of every picture I upload to Facebook into my Dropbox account (or at least I could, I think it broke). But I can't make it save that picture in original size, because someone didn't expose some option, or an endpoint. Or I can't make IFTTT save all the reactions to my post into a CSV in the format: <<datetime, which post, who, what reaction>>, because such endpoints again aren't exposed or integrated. Etc. I get that IFTTT & folks are doing the best they can, but the companies they're trying to "mush together" made their money on preventing interoperability, so it's still very far from both what could be and what used to be possible.
- alexis_read 7y ago
  You could try nodered-self hosted or cloud options. It has plugins for most stuff including GPIO, MQTT, HTTP, email, twitter. https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/

rtpg 7y ago

The fact that stuff that used to be on local files is now inside these various services makes it _much harder_ to bootstrap together simple programs I think. Though on the other hand if you leverage some other automation tools you can avoid figuring out how to auth to various systems yourself. You just end up contributing to the "everything is connected by duct tape" nature of modern software

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Sorta, kinda, not quite. That's the problem with SaaS - they take your data, silo it up, and expose through highly limited and tightly controlled APIs. Sure, I can make IFTTT save a copy of every picture I upload to Facebook into my Dropbox account (or at least I could, I think it broke). But I can't make it save that picture in original size, because someone didn't expose some option, or an endpoint. Or I can't make IFTTT save all the reactions to my post into a CSV in the format: <<datetime, which post, who, what reaction>>, because such endpoints again aren't exposed or integrated. Etc. I get that IFTTT & folks are doing the best they can, but the companies they're trying to "mush together" made their money on preventing interoperability, so it's still very far from both what could be and what used to be possible.

alexis_read 7y ago
You could try nodered-self hosted or cloud options. It has plugins for most stuff including GPIO, MQTT, HTTP, email, twitter. https://nodered.org/ https://nodered.org/