Just emailed you. I think NewsBlur would be a valuable enough immediate addition that it would be worthwhile. I know I have plenty of demand on my side.
Sorry to hear your task got turned off. You should have gotten a notice via email about it. We monitor tasks that have trouble running (in this case perhaps the feed was down?) and always make sure to ping the task owners about it when we turn them off.
I got the e-mail, but the only take-away I got from it was sad trombone.
From what you're saying, you did it as a service to me, the user, and not to yourselves to save resources, which is what the e-mail notification sounds like - which annoyed me a bit, I have to admit.
I'll give it a second shot and send you an e-mail when or if it happens again. :)
Ok sounds good. Perhaps we need to revisit the tone in that email, it IS intended as a service to you. If something isn't working as expected we wanted to make sure you knew about it. Its on us to make sure to get you more precise information about what is going wrong. Thanks for the feedback!
Right now it just covers a single 'if this then that' statement, but expanding from there is definitely a direction we could take. However, we'd like to be really cautious about getting to close to traditional programming as things could quickly become unaccessible to the wider audience. We talk a lot about pushing complexity out to the channels themselves. For instance if "its going to rain tomorrow AND tomorrow is a weekday" might be easier to understand if its encapsulated in a single, complex trigger.
Also, just my designer's advice, I would do something about the Instagram icon. It stands out way too much from the rest of the site which I think you've designed beautifully. Maybe make your own iteration in Illustrator, mimicing those flat-colored geometric shapes that dominate the design language of the page?
Yes, I think multiple criteria could be a simpler solution to having the same functionality as nested statements. I think maybe two or three criteria would be good, without getting out of hand. This is a cool concept, definitely keep at it.
Hi, obviously infinite loops will become an issue we will have to deal with as the service grows. Especially if we start running tasks at a much faster clip and not just every 15 minutes.
It's probably not too hard to solve the problem. You could create a directed graph where the nodes are triggers and the edges are actions and make sure there are no cycles created whenever a user turns on or creates a task.
Caveats to the above are that you'd need to make sure that accounts in the channels are tied to single users (or join together the graphs of multiple users where they share channel accounts). You'd also need to handle odd edge cases with trigger fields and addins - such as a user @mentioning themselves and triggering an action to reply to the user who mentioned them.
Or if there were a way to leave the site and come back again - say a similar service starts up with any compatible inverse pair of inputs and outputs.
I have to admit, I look at stuff like this and my first reaction is "hmm, what could possibly go wrong... could we somehow use this to calculate prime numbers perhaps?"
On the contrary, I feel that the large representation of a Recipe conveys a sense of accessibility and simplicity. It says, "this is something you can understand, it will not boggle your mind, stress you out, or confuse you."
Compare this with Yahoo Pipes, which provided a similar service with an interface intimidating to non-technical users.
While I did start by thinking "am I zoomed in on this site for some reason" the large size has actually grown on me. Overall I really like pretty much every aspect of the design.
On a seperate note: for phone calling, it said US only but it seems to work for international numbers as well. (Was wanting to see if I could set up a nice wake-up call...)
Glad to hear some folks like it. Was going for an interface that had a feeling physicality, something that might not look out of place on a kitchen appliance. Size was an easy way to accomplish that, but at the expense of getting lots of info on the screen.
Feedback for simplicity: is there a need for the term "Recipes"? Can't they just be called Tasks? Some Tasks can be public/shared, but another term doesn't appear to be needed.
