I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

Tag: IFTTT

Incredibly useful automation service

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

Posted by on in Tech

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)

Posted by on in Mobile Applications, Tech

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)

Posted by on in Tech, The Internet of Things

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.

IFTTT and connecting things to other things

Posted by on in Tech

I haven’t written about IFTTT for a while now although I’m still a big fan. Of course, of late, their big news is their iOS app. It was a very clever way to bring the service to iOS. They didn’t just bring the web version of the service to the app store. Instead they made it work beautifully, but over and above that gave the app specific iOS only channels. Now that’s clever.

Of course one of the big problems with IFTTT is that it works so well. Which means that actually you can for the most part just forget about it and leave it to get on with what you wanted it to do in the first place. However, I guess that is almost a problem for IFTTT as they probably want you to do more than set up a bunch of recipes and then never return, or rarely return.

So the app addresses that to a degree. I found myself using it for a while and then recently a lot less. Again, the reason is that IFTTT works so well that I don’t need to do anything more.

There are still lots of things I think that IFTTT could improve. Support for multiple accounts for twitter and other services for example, but even without these it is very good.

So, what’s next for IFTTT? Well of course there’s Android. There’s room for an extended iPad version. But always wonder if they could perhaps push a little further than connecting two services. Perhaps they could become IF THIS THEN THAT (AND THIS), or perhaps IF THIS THEN THAT ELSE IF THIS? You get where I’m going anyway.

Who knows. One things for sum. Automation will continue.