Day One (2) Adds IFTTT integration

They’d said that they were going to do that, but now they actually have. It looks ok. But it’s made me wonder why I would automate a journal entry? What would that work? I’m not sure at all.

Anyway, I’m still on Day One ‘Classic’ and not 2 as yet as I’ve had too many problems with the new version. This might help me try version 2 again. Maybe.

IFTTT retiring their Etsy channel

I’m a big fan of IFTTT. It’s a great service, and one that seems to be expanding all the time. However, sometimes they do take stuff away as well, and today I got an email stating just that. I understand that services like IFTTT have to change and sometimes those changes don’t make me so happy.

Today they’re taking the Etsy channel away, amongst many others. This is ok I guess, but I did like the Etsy channel and I do like Etsy too. Never mind.

A simple IFTTT app arrives for Pebble

I noticed it on the Pebble Time store the other day and installed it. It seems easier to use than the other one I have, which only seems to work intermittently. Also, this one has three slots to trigger different recipes, all using the IFTTT maker channel, which is expected.

I haven’t had any time to try it out as yet, mainly because I have thought of three things I want to automate via the IFTTT maker channel. Perhaps I will, and then I’ll tell you how it works out.

New IFTTT stuff coming to littleBits!

So I got an email saying that there will be outage on the littleBits IFTTT channel on Monday, the 21st. This is because there’s some work going on to add new triggers and actions to the littleBits IFTTT channel. Now that’s something to look forward to next week!

I wonder what they’ll add?

So when will there be a Pebble IFTTT channel?

Now that would be super useful. I’m sure that it was promised a long time ago, possibly when the first Pebble watch came out, but it never really happened. Well, it didn’t happen at all.

The nearest thing to it is an app called This Button for Pebble, which allows an HTTP push from your Pebble. That’s really useful, but I’ve only been able to get it to work intermittently so far. Perhaps I need to persevere with it.

Of course, a real IFTTT channel would be better. Ideally for me it would have:

  • Battery status
  • Accelerometer function
  • Access to buttons
  • Access to the microphone

That lot would do for a start anyway. That would be fun to play with and create recipes with on IFTTT. I’d like to see that.

I wonder if it’ll come about?

What to do with a wemo switch?

I’ve had this WEMO switch for ages now, and I got it working doing things like switching on a light depending on twitter hashtags using IFTTT. That’s all fine, and quite good fun, but essentially not too useful. So I’ve been thinking about what I could use it for that would be a really good and useful application of the device.

So far, nothing. No ideas at all. Which is a shame as I think it’s a good idea and should have a use. I just haven’t found it as yet.

IFTTT becomes IF and launches 3 new apps

I’m always interested in seeing what IFTTT do. Now they’ve become IF, or at least their main app has become IF and the interface has changed too. If that wasn’t enough though they’ve launched another three apps as well. I’m not entirely sure that I get the idea behind these three new ‘Do’ apps. Perhaps I need to spend a bit more time with them though, to really get what they’re trying to achieve.

What I’d really like to see them do is …

  • Multiple accounts for a channel, so being able to use more than one twitter account
  • Set times for when a channel runs, so control the frequency, like running something twice a day or every 10 minutes
  • Support for chaining

Let’s see if they do anything like that.

IFTTT comes to Android, and what I’d like to see next

Well it had to happen sooner or later. They’d done the iOS app, the iPad version, Android is the obvious next stop on the route. But I think they did it right. Adding a whole bunch of Android only functionality into the delivery. I thought that was a really nice touch.

Of course, on the day they launched their app didn’t support the 7″ tablet, so it wouldn’t install on my nexus, but it didn’t take long to fix at all which was impressive. I haven’t really had a chance to test out the Android only channels and functionality. Hopefully late this week or early next I might be able to do that, but what I’ve seen so far looks pretty impressive and should allow some interesting cross platform working to occur.

IFTTT have made themselves completely indispensable when it comes to web automation, I do wonder where they’ll go next though. They’ve added so many apps that their service is really comprehensive now, but what I’d really like to see is some improvement in some of the core services, like the simple ability to add multiple accounts for a service under a single IFTTT account.

All I’d like to be able to do is to add more than one twitter account in IFTTT. That would make it so much more useful. I expect that they will do this at some point, perhaps with some kind of ‘pro’ account feature.

I’d pay for that.

IFTTT comes to Android, but not your Android (well not mine really)

I got really excited today when I heard that IFTTT was finally coming to Android. It was always something I knew that they’d do, just a question of when, and the when was now. So when I opened up my Nexus 7 to find the IFTTT app on google play, and it wasn’t there I was a little disappointed. Of course, it was there, but just not for me, or rather, not for the Nexus 7.

I suppose it will come to Android tablets eventually, but it’ll take a little while I guess, which is a shame as the Nexus 7 was Google’s flagship 7″ tablet. I suppose I just don’t get why apps like this can’t come to the OS fully universal from day one? It doesn’t make sense to me.

So I’m back to waiting again for this, and what’s worse, I know about the Android specific channels that IFTTT have built into their Android app. So I really do know what I’m missing!

If this then apparently not that (or when things go wrong)

Something I have relied on for a while now is IFTTT (if this then that). Today, it fell over. Here’s what they had to say about their issues:

Last night at approximately 10:00pm PST much of the work IFTTT does in the background stopped due to an issue with one of our backend services. Our monitoring systems would have alerted us to the problem immediately, but those unfortunately failed as well and we weren’t able to fix the issue until this morning at 10:00am PST.

Any affected Recipes should pick up right where they left off last night.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We know that many of you have come to depend on IFTTT in your everyday lives and we take great pride in that. A stoppage of work for this duration is unacceptable and we will do whatever it takes to ensure we get in front of these issues much faster in the future.

As always with this kind of thing you know that it’s going to get sorted, but waiting around is just a pain. It makes me realise that we rely on these services for so many things, or rather I do anyway, and increasingly, with the rise of the internet of things, these services extend themselves into the real world too.