mikeknoop

Interestingly enough we were split on this decision. We had a few people who thought we should go a straight scripting/API route and our own intuition saying we should add structure through our interface.

In the end we've tried to support the best of both world. You can add your endpoints using our interface and drop down to a scripting API (Javascript) to have fine-grained control over how we prepare requests/responses to and from your server. This gives you a lot of flexibility if you want it but it's not required.

You might check out a few of our highlights: https://zapier.com/zapbook/reviews/

If you're writing an API for your app/product/startup, you can build an integration with Zapier's developer platform and kick-start your API program with 60+ integrations right out of the gate.

Very, very excited this is going live today. We're looking forward to the awesome things developers can do with this. We've already been extremely surprised by the creativity of our end-users and are expecting a similar story from our developers.

A few quick ideas:

1. hook your own SaaS app up to Zapier so all of our users (and your customers!) can use it

2. write an integration for a SaaS app you don't own but want to integrate with

3. connect your in-house tools to external SaaS apps through Zapier

Avoiding the 1-for-1 point breakdown, if you saw the amount of traffic a single vendor can push to your app via integration awareness (blog post, integration directories, mailing list, etc.) one would come to the conclusion that it is a viable marketing channel.

The spirit of OP is not that you should ignore traditional marketing; it simply points out an alternative most may not be aware of.

You can also move dots around. For example the following all go to the same inbox:

    myemailaddress@gmail.com
    my.emailaddress@gmail.com
    myemail.address@gmail.com

etc.

The part that is particularly noteworthy is not that "Reddit" discussed the event, rather, Reddit enabled a single user named integ3r to offer a more succinct, comprehensive, unbiased, unsensationalized story than anywhere else in the media surrounding the event.

I've been following integ3r's coverage since he started. The most recent updates are here: http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/wyi5s/comprehensive_ti...

There's certainly something good to be said about an up-to-the-minute, continually updated, sourced, short form, curated, stream of news.

I got 1/3 of the way into the article and said to myself, gosh this sounds just like Valve's Source Multiplayer writeup they did many years ago. Sure enough! The author mentions 1/2 way the work is based off of it.

We tried to build functionality as fast as users were requesting it. It seems like the AdSense approach will turn a lot of folks off once they realize it's only a landing page. Clearly valuable in determining if an idea backed by marketing can get traction.

But, how do you convince those AdSense users to share their true problems (or do you just target a really specific keyword niche) before they bounce?

One way we (Zapier) got early users in the door was by trolling forums. We would manually search the internet for people complaining about integrations that didn't exist (eg. http://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/13007/how-can-i-a...). We would follow up directly, build the integration, and instantly have a new customer. Clearly this doesn't scale [or does it?] but it put us on the right track early when we weren't sure what people would respond to.

If it doesn't already, you could overlay a transparent div on top of the entire body to capture all click events.

This is something you can use Zapier for: https://zapier.com/zapbook/email/trello

also Evernote: https://zapier.com/zapbook/email/evernote

For now, the setup is similar (triggers/actions). But why aren't all of our users just using IFTTT? Primarily the allure to a business-focused app, with services they use today, and support on top. We'll naturally diverge more over time but the "easy" starting point when trying to sync lots of different services looks the same.

While the IFTTT comparison is timely, our (Zapier) middle to long term strategies diverge significantly. We're big fans of what Linden has going on. We love the idea of making APIs usable for regular people!

I think the reason Rotten Tomatoes is successful in because by in large, most reviews are negative. The true good movies actually stand-out.

For Smugg, when the homepage consists of all reviews in the 80-95 range, you can't tell things apart. It's just another generic review site that says everything is "okay", when in reality, the baked-in, out of the box experience of a device usually sucks in day-to-day use.

I don't know how you're getting reviews, but you could honestly seed this yourself by critically analyzing Engadget reviews and really focus on the flaws of the product, instead of the "features" for generating your scores.

Presumably you have the auth flow in the new tab finish on a simple page containing a script. What does that script do to notify the original window that the auth flow is finished?

> "We had a limited amount of materials to pick from," Smith says. "I can’t say what they are, but we’ve patented the hell out of it."

Wait wait wait, someone needs to explain to them what the intent of a patent actually is.

I guess I disagree here (but who doesn't with HTTP status codes...). I try to reserve 5XX codes for actual errors. In this case, no error occurred, the response is just delayed.

You might make this more obvious. Also, you might state how to distinguish between "sorry we need more time to look this up" and an actual 404 or error.

HTTP code 202 Accepted seems appropriate for this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTTP_status_codes)

I had to refresh the page a few seconds later to get my ID information to show up after the first request.

My thoughts exactly! I easily get less than 60 calls per hour so this would be perfect. Interestingly, the caller ID for my number is tied to the first owner of my account before it was transferred to me (which happened many years ago).

The font size is responsive, try re-sizing the browser. The font scales.

Apply the CounterStrike model of short 3 minute rounds and you'd have yourself an actual game here.

The Nexus S received the update. The Nexus S 4G (on Sprint) did NOT YET receive the update.

-- Nexus S 4G owner.

+1, I would use this the same way

As TazeTSchnitzel alludes to, HTC and their Sense interface use a similar "special manufacturer" authentication permission to accomplish this.

EDIT: To clarify, Facebook has made a special deal with HTC (or Sony in the case of this post) to allow these non-standard browser oAuth flows.

Is this still best practice? What's the more "up to date" method?

Usually the most intriguing part of any genetic-algorithm type optimization is the fitness function. In your case, what makes a good or fun game?

From the first paper it looks like you tried to achieve steady forward progress (in terms of power ups and "reachability"). Did you consider any alternative fitness functions?

Actually (and annoyingly) in many vehicles the controls are disabled while the vehicle is in motion. This is very inconvenient when you have a passenger trying to operate the console (such as input destination or do other actions) but the car won't let you because you're not completely stopped.