Ifttt / If This Then That, killer UI, great service | Hacker News Reader

Ifttt / If This Then That, killer UI, great service

ifttt.com

33 pointslolizbak18 comments

Just discovered this: ifttt, don't know if it's been posted before

Their UI is really neat and slick. The service automates tasks, on triggers you define (twitter, facebook, sms, email, delicious, ...).

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I go to the "about" page - http://ifttt.com/wtf - and get:

    Apologies, ifttt requires a spiffy new browser
    to work all its magic correctly.  Your current
    browser isn't compatible.

I don't expect to be told to upgrade just to find out what something does. Can't they produce an explanation that doesn't require a "spiffy new browser" ?? The blog post is simple enough to render properly in my elderly browser on my elderly machine, but it just talks aboute event-driven programming for the masses, and waiting in line for Indian food.

It's April 1st, and that makes me grumpy, but there's a lesson for all people who want to present a product to the world:

    Make it easy for people
    to want your product.

    Don't make it hard for
    people to see what you do!

Hi, what elderly browser are you using? Will see if I can fix.

  Upgrade browser

  Apologies, ifttt requires a spiffy new browser to work
  all its magic correctly. Your current browser isn't
  compatible.

I'm using Iceweasel 3.6.13 which is modern enough I think.

Someone has been using browser sniffing incorrectly. For the record my UserAgent is:

  Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686 (x86_64); en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101210 Firefox/3.0.6 (like Firefox/3.6.13) FirePHP/0.5

If you notice I enabled the option to not send Iceweasel in the useragent since it was causing problems.

Are you sure that this is a problem with the UserAgent? You don't happen to use NoScript and the site just doesn't degrade with a useful message?

I do have NoScript, so I turned it off, but it still happened, so that's not the problem.

Are you the author of the site? You shouldn't be sniffing browsers anyway, I see you are using jQuery. Use jQuery.support instead.

jQuery.support is deprecated, use Modernizr instead.

Modernizr might be interesting, but jQuery.support is not depreciated. Perhaps you are thinking of jQuery.browser which is.

Deprecated is the correct word.

Not the author, just curious/interested. And I agree with your last two sentences..

My apologies, will get the browser sniffing code fix right away!

It does not work as of right now.

Don't fix the code - get rid of it. You should not be sniffing browsers anyway, there are too many unusual cases.

I love the idea (sort of a locale/Android for the cloud?), but was instantly reminded of "Daemon", by Daniel Suarez.

1: http://thedaemon.com/

Check the about page for description of their service: http://ifttt.com/wtf

"when something happens (this) then do something else (that)."

Example triggers: "if I'm tagged in a photo on Facebook" or "if I tweet on twitter."

Example actions: "then send me a text message" or "then create a status message on Facebook."

Example channels: Twitter, Facebook, Delicious, Email, Phone Call, Weather, ...

Looks like a very interesting service. I can see some scope in using it for business. I'm thinking automation of certain reputation management / customer service scenarios

You might want to link to your about page rather than your homepage. I had no idea what your service did until I looked at that page.

Nice idea though.

Hi Peter, not my product, and just linked to the homepage - you're right.

By the way, love the URL of the about page : http://ifttt.com/wtf :))

Excellent idea on putting the about page front and center, thank you.

Interesting. I've thought about doing this myself, only with a mobile component to it, and a somewhat broader scope for the data inputs.

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