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Discoverability. Knowing how to connect together multiple services isn't obvious. What kind of information can IFTTT take in and what does google sheets output?

Discoverability. Knowing how to connect together multiple services isn't obvious. What kind of information can IFTTT take in and what does google sheets output? That's not obvious. I use Beorg (an org-mode interface) on my iPhone and I still look up recipes the developer puts online showing how to hook it up with the Shortcuts app and do clever things. Mostly because I don't have a good idea of what interfaces between things are available on my phone. The time of hoping that non-technical users would write little things on the command line seems to have past. I recently read an interview where Aho said that in the beginning awk was used by non-technical people. Now awk usage is probably even on the technical end of technical. But I'm betting that there are plenty of savvy users who could put together complex automation workflows if they had a unifying tool that demonstrated the potential.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Right. Discoverability. And I'd also add, paradox of choice. If you have 20 different ways you could use to automate some things you need (but not all, and solutions only partially overlap in the problem space), you may as well have none. Defaults matter. I doubt we would be able to have a third-party solution reach ubiquity again, the way e.g. Flash had, so having powerful functionality integrated at the OS level would be very helpful, as it would remove the problem of figuring out what to use.
- yoz-y 7y ago
  macOS had automator for a long time and even usage of that must have went quite down for them to let Sal go. It's quite sad because as others have said I think the percentage went down mostly because of more people coming in. Now that they have introduced Shortcuts to iOS I would be curious about how many people use them and to what extent.
zaphar 7y ago
It's always been difficult to discover this stuff. There has always been a very small subset of people who were driven to figure it out, in part at least, because it was hard. To reiterate what ChuckMcM said at the top of this thread. The "hackers" who would figure that stuff out are still there still doing things no one expected could be done systems that no one thought would be used in those ways. We didn't actually lose anything. It's just a little obscured by the sea of consumers of computing who aren't hacking on those systems. The filters that kept the consumer away from computing are mostly gone but that didn't make the consumer magically become interested in tinkering with those systems.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

Right. Discoverability. And I'd also add, paradox of choice. If you have 20 different ways you could use to automate some things you need (but not all, and solutions only partially overlap in the problem space), you may as well have none. Defaults matter. I doubt we would be able to have a third-party solution reach ubiquity again, the way e.g. Flash had, so having powerful functionality integrated at the OS level would be very helpful, as it would remove the problem of figuring out what to use.

yoz-y 7y ago
macOS had automator for a long time and even usage of that must have went quite down for them to let Sal go. It's quite sad because as others have said I think the percentage went down mostly because of more people coming in. Now that they have introduced Shortcuts to iOS I would be curious about how many people use them and to what extent.

zaphar 7y ago

It's always been difficult to discover this stuff. There has always been a very small subset of people who were driven to figure it out, in part at least, because it was hard. To reiterate what ChuckMcM said at the top of this thread. The "hackers" who would figure that stuff out are still there still doing things no one expected could be done systems that no one thought would be used in those ways. We didn't actually lose anything. It's just a little obscured by the sea of consumers of computing who aren't hacking on those systems. The filters that kept the consumer away from computing are mostly gone but that didn't make the consumer magically become interested in tinkering with those systems.