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Re:Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011) by nlawalker on Sunday July 28, 2019 @11:30PM (#20551330)
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.
Re:Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011) by TeMPOraL on Monday July 29, 2019 @02:32AM (#20551975)
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.

Re:Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011) by alexis_read on Monday July 29, 2019 @09:47AM (#20554525)
You could try nodered-self hosted or cloud options. It has plugins for most stuff including GPIO, MQTT, HTTP, email, twitter.

https://nodered.org/

Re:Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011) by rtpg on Sunday July 28, 2019 @11:59PM (#20551413)
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