Comment by TeMPOraL
12 hours ago
This is a larger topic that's worthy of a comparably large rant, which I really don't want to do right now, but to keep it short, in my subjective view:
- IFTTT was great when it started; at some point, it became... weird, in a "I don't even know what's going on on my screen, is this a poster or an app" kind of way.
- Zapier is an unpenetrable mess, evidently targets marketers and other business users; discovery is hard, and even though it seems like it has everything, it - like all tools in this space - is always missing the one feature you actually need.
- Yahoo Pipes, I heard they were great, but I only learned about them after they shut down.
- Apple Shortcuts - not sure what you can do with those, but over the years of reading about them in HN comments, I think they may be the exception here, in being both targeting regular users and actually useful.
- Samsung Modes and Routines - only recently becoming remotely useful, so that's nice, even if vendor-restricted.
- Tasker - an Android tool that actually manages to offer useful automation, despite the entire platform/OS and app ecosystem trying its best to prevent it. Which is great, if your main computer is a phone. It sucks in a world of cloud/SaaS, because it creates a silly situation where e.g. I could nicely automate some things involving e-mail and calendars from Tasker + FairEmail, but... well my mailboxes and calendars lives in the cloud so some of that would conflict with use of vendor (Fastmail) webapp or any other tool.
Or, in short: we need Tasker but for web (and without some of the legacy baggage around UI and variable handling).
The sorry state of automation is not entirely, or even mostly, the fault of the automation platforms. I may have issues with some UI and business choices some of these platforms made, but really, the main issue is that integrations are business deals and the integrated sides quickly learned to provide only a limited set of features - never enough to allow users to actually automate use of some product. There's always some features missing. You can read data but not write it. You can read files and create new files but not edit or delete them. You can add new tasks but can't get a list of existing ones. Etc.
It's another reason LLMs are such a great thing to happen - they make it easy (for now) to force interoperability between parties that desperately want to prevent it. After all, worst case, I can have the LLM operate the vendor site through a browser, pretending to be a human. Not very reliable, but much better than nothing at all.
Similarly short on reply here, but quickly: IFTTT: hah, I agree. It was awesome when it was more about IoT than Spotify to Google Sheets.
And re: Zapier: yes, that’s the key to Zapier, from my experience: usage in marketing and the “power user” base.
Re: shortcuts: (I live in the Apple ecosystem) Shortcuts + AppleScript is gold on macOS. Shortcuts + iOS is about to be game changing - it already changed the game, it’s just nobody has been playing it, because it’s not “fun”.
After Siri+Gemini+Shortcuts, everyone will be playing it, I suspect, even on Android, it will get built somehow.
> Or, in short: we need Tasker but for web (and without some of the legacy baggage around UI and variable handling).
n8n, node-RED and others already exist. There are many tools for automations, and I guess most of them can also do cron-like jobs.
Node RED is still unwieldy for the masses, as easy as it is for a consumer to install, it’s not necessarily as easy to use.
Consumer grade automations built on node-RED? I suppose it depends on the market, but most people aren’t going to want to fiddle with it, I suspect.
A plugin for Chrome might be able to take off though, or some killer mobile app, but it needs to run on a cheap phone and control things without having to keep track of loops and logic and variables and all the fun stuff.
None of the tools here are for the masses. Automation in itself is already hard to grasp for the average user, and while some of those are simpler to start than others, they all are wall to climb.