Prompt debuts “a command line for the real world” | Hacker News Reader

Prompt debuts “a command line for the real world”

techcrunch.com

29 pointsgnkchintu16 comments

Fetch closed last summer after raising $3.05 million. According to Hadfield, the service grew quickly with very high retention and engagement, but the team couldn’t find a scalable business model.

Hmmm. Perhaps this is a line of questioning that could have been pursued with respect to the current venture?

I'm not sure I buy the idea that there's a market for this.

The main argument for CLIs over GUIs is that they're faster to use (assuming you know what you're doing). I don't imagine typing out commands on a smartphone touchscreen is faster than using that same touchscreen to navigate an app.

I only see this appealing to the kind of people that read Hacker News, and even then only those who use CLIs because they find them more fun/interesting than GUIs, rather than for utilitarian reasons.

Will it include programming structures (loops, conditionals, etc) and documentation (i.e. @prompt help @prompt)?

Would then also need to handle 'weird' cases that can dos a service, such as the silly: @uber While True { from x to y; cancel;}

Could services be compounded? What if I want my domino's pizza delivered to a location, picked up by an uber and delivered to my work address? (maybe dominos doesn't service my area but I have a vitamin p deficiency)

Don't forget the great fun to be had with out-of-order SMS messages. I really don't get this app. All the macros advertised in the article are so basic I can do (or already do) them via voice activation, which is so quick I don't even need to grab and turn on my phone's display. For more interesting stuff I want to have block diagrams for flows and triggers (kind of like the Automate app actually). Another downside is the likely closed or at least very opaque nature of the commands. Dominoes is gross, I want anything else. No one wrote a plugin for Papa Johns, and I don't know how or it would take forever, and even if the Dominoes plugin was open source I doubt it would be very enlightening for writing one for another pizza place. Guess I'll go hungry. Or, how about something as dead-simple as recording a workflow with hooks for interaction like password entry so that I do it once myself and then afterwards it replays it, even alerting me if during a future replay things aren't as expected? That might not be allowed on the app store though, because god forbid our phones be general purpose computational devices.

Surely they're going to have to change the name. https://panic.com/prompt/

There's very little overlap between the two products, and for that overlap, "prompt" is a generic term.

ISTM "Panic Sync", the first listed feature at your link, by which private keys are transferred all over, is actually a mis-feature, a bad idea that shouldn't be made easier for the user.

I don't know why you felt to bash the product. That seems irrelevant here.

When I first saw the headline my first thought was that maybe it was a new version of Panic Prompt, so clearly there is scope for confusion here.

There's definitely something in the air...

Shall we call it session-based search perhaps?

https://medium.com/@tedlivingston/the-future-of-chat-isn-t-a...

http://www.theverge.com/2016/3/1/11136298/hound-app-ios-andr...

https://developer.amazon.com/appsandservices/solutions/alexa...

The problem text based interfaces solve is a lack of UI standardization. In a desktop environment a command line can be superior to some designer's attempt to express herself through a fancy GUI. However, key strokes on mobile are MUCH more expensive than in a desktop environment. What would have been a 4 second interaction on a desktop might be 20 seconds on a phone, simply because typing is slower. What this needs is a minimalistic UI for executing commands that doesn't involve typing. The workflow would look something like this: Unlock phone > tap Uber > tap destination > tap execute > lock phone.

I don't see a support feature on the site, but since this is a YC company, I figure I can list an issue here:

@whois google.com is not working. It just replies: "@whois: Please enter a valid domain name. Example: @whois google.com" Same for other domains.

Edit: This only occurs over SMS, not through the site. My guess is that my carrier (Fi) is doing something to munge the domain name that Prompt needs to parse correctly.

The examples in the screenshot look like the kind of functionality you get from OK Google, only with having to type rather than speak.

I like the idea. I'm surprised there isn't a CLI for it.

Stay tuned - CLI for Prompt commands launching next week!

Timing is everything. To me, this is just Dynamic Networds from the mid-1990's. :)

IFTTT is a kind of rule-based command line too.

With more integrations. Put the two together though...

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