IFTTT automates the steps that we need to take to obtain the information that we need and perform the actions that we desire; it’s essentially the digital butler of the Internet

Programmers are very familiar with the phrase “If This, Then That” when it comes to building software, but did you know that you can also use these four words to run your everyday life, all through your smartphone?

If This, Then That (IFTTT) is a web-based service with accompanying Android and iOS smartphone apps that creates chains of conditional statements: If this happens, then make that happen. For example: If “it’s going to rain tomorrow,” then “send me a text message.” This allows all of the technology in your life — from social media to smart devices — to work together as one, using your smartphone as the link.

That’s where IFTTT comes in. It automates many of the “laborious” steps that we need to take to get the information that we want. Much like programming languages, “If This Then That” tells the program what to do next, so the user doesn’t have to.

For example, IFTTT can send you a text message each morning with the weather forecast so that you don’t have to open your Weather app. It can also open your navigation app on your phone when you get in your car or send your blog posts to Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter, all without you lifting a finger. It’s essentially the digital butler of the internet.

In this column, we describe how to get started with IFTTT and some of the best ways that you can use this powerful little tool.

I love IFTTT (If This Then That), but although it usually works well, it’s more and more common for triggers to fail. Sometimes they don’t fail, but take several minutes to activate. When you want a light to turn on as you enter a room, several minutes of delay clearly can be a deal-breaker. I’m not sure if the problem is capacity issues or individual API problems, but I no longer feel confident that IFTTT will fire reliably. Although it’s still in beta, Stringify aims to be more reliable, but also more robust.

With IFTTT, simplicity is king. You have a single trigger (If…) and a single action (then that…). With Stringify, you have “flows”, which allow multiple results along with conditionals. Basically, you write a logical flow of triggers and results using the same sorts of triggers and results IFTTT offers. Granted, the number of connected services is significantly smaller, but the number is growing all the time. There’s also no web-based interface for the Stringify building process, which bums me out. I would rather have a big screen to build flows, but it’s only possible to manipulate your account on a mobile device (Android or iOS).

It’s not clear whether Stringify will end up being more popular and/or more reliable than IFTTT. It certainly has the promise to surpass the usefulness of IFTTT though.

https://www.stringify.com/

IFTTT- The Ultimate Guide
http://www.mysmartahome.com/ifttt-ultimate-guide/

My name is James.

I know that you must be very busy and so I will keep this brief.

The reason why I am contacting you is to let you know about a very detailed article that I have written about IFTTT.

It is 3500 words long and I have made it as reader friendly as possible by using lots of graphics and splitting it into different chapters.

It is incredibly detailed and includes chapters on;

*Popular applets,
*Creating an IFTTT account and
*An analysis of some of IFTTT’s competitors
*As well as lots of other information…

If you think that it could be a useful source of information to your readers please let me know and I will give you more details.

Thanks for reading this.

Best Wishes,

James

AWS Lambda Makes Serverless Applications A Reality
http://techcrunch.com/2015/11/24/aws-lamda-makes-serverless-applications-a-reality/?ncid=rss&cps=gravity_1462_2880799555608892#.ojwuxm:bZ6K

Most companies today develop applications and deploy them on servers — whether on-premises or in the cloud. That means figuring out how much server, storage and database power they need ahead of time, and deploying all of the hardware and software it takes to run the application. Suppose you didn’t want to deal with all of that and were looking for a new model that handled all of the underlying infrastructure deployment for you?

Amazon Web Services’ Lambda Service offers a way to do just that today. With Lambda, instead of deploying these massively large applications, you deploy an application with some single-action triggers and you only pay for the compute power you use, priced in 100 millisecond increments of usage. You can have as many triggers as you like running in tandem or separately. When the conditions are met, it triggers the programmed actions.

Welcome to the world of the serverless app.

Over the years, the rate of deployment speed and how long these deployments live has gone down dramatically — and Lambda reduces that to milliseconds.

We are in the midst of an evolutionary shift where Lambda encapsulates shifting developer priorities and requirements. As I wrote last year when Lambda launched at AWS re:invent:

As AWS’s CTO Werner Vogels pointed out, this will enable programmers to reduce their overall development effort. You simply write the code and define the event triggers, and it will run for you automatically when the conditions are met.

Triggers could be actions like a user uploading a file from a smart phone or clicking the Buy button on a website, or they could be machine-to-machine actions without humans involved. The idea is that they are flexible so just about anything can be a trigger. What’s more, developers can use familiar programming tools to create the triggers, and Amazon provides a list of prewritten common ones.

Those conditions could be met every fraction of a second as with an Internet of Things scenario with sensors constantly feeding an application a stream of data or it could be weekly.

Brave New World

Technically no application can be serverless of course. There has to be some sort of hardware underpinning the application, but what Amazon has done with Lambda is enabled developers to automate programming to the point AWS takes care of all of the complexity related to the server deployments, storage and the database, Matt Wood general manager of product strategy at AWS explained.

“Most people were baffled by Lambda, but lots of people [have been] thinking about serverless architecture. You’re not scaling machines up and down. It lets the machines be invisible and is a very cost-effective architecture,” he said.

When Lambda Comes Into Play

Lambda works best in two types of scenarios, AWS’s Wood says. On one end of the spectrum, you might have a situation where actions happen rather infrequently and it makes little sense to pay for servers you’re not using most of the time such as the weekly drone photos scenario.

On the other end, you might be building something big and complex that needs to scale quickly and trying to deploy the infrastructure would be challenging. Suppose you have a network of weather sensors feeding you information and once that information is collected a number of things have to happen. You could trigger an event each time the sensor sends data, and program the series of required actions, keeping mind that this is likely is quite often, measured in fractions of seconds.

One client using this technology is Major League Baseball. The trigger is the action of the pitch being thrown, the ball being hit, the runner taking off and so forth. They can then track this data in real time and Lambda deals with all of the infrastructure for them, providing as much firepower as needed at the time to capture the information and run the data. And for the six months of the year where there isn’t any baseball, MLB isn’t paying for infrastructure it doesn’t need.

While this approach to programming isn’t a magic bullet by any means, it’s a new tool for developers who might not need a more traditional server set up, and it gives them options when they are designing the program and deciding how to deploy it.

“Lambda lets [developers] focus on developing applications without worrying about the heavy lifting of all the behind the scenes stuff of building the application,” Wood said. And it’s ushered in a world of serverless app deployment.

Burner’s new developer tool lets you control your smart home by text
http://venturebeat.com/2015/11/24/burners-new-developer-tool-lets-you-control-your-smart-home-by-text/

More than a month after Burner launched its native integrations with Evernote, Slack, Dropbox, and SoundCloud, the provider of disposable phone numbers is opening itself up to developers. The company has released a way for third-parties to connect Burner with any number of applications or create new custom ones through the use of webhooks.

Developers interested in finding better uses for phone numbers can tap into these webhooks to create their own “If This Then That” (IFTTT) recipes that’ll perform specific actions. Burner’s chief executive, Greg Cohn, told VentureBeat that while his company has been working on native partnerships with Evernote and Slack, there are some integrations that it could never have thought up. With the release of this developer connection, the possibilities are seemingly endless.

Webhooks are more simplified versions of Application Program Interfaces (APIs) that you often hear companies releasing. When you want one application to pass information on to another, the first one submits a POST command to a web address with the information needed. The second application has been programmed to always know what to do with that data.

Although one might imagine that a developer would be needed to set this up, Burner said that anyone can take advantage of its developer connection by using a service like IFTTT or Zapier. By doing so, a custom integration can be made so that if a text is received at a Burner number, it can be programmed to, for example, cause your smart lights to flash in your home. Or perhaps store that message in your Trello board.

“The open Web will do more interesting things than Burner can,” said Cohn.

Right now Burner is only allowing outbound connections, meaning that its service is sending information to third-party apps. What this means is that you cannot program Slack, Trello, or your August smart lock to send data to your disposable phone number or to the Burner app. Cohn said that this decision was made to reduce the chance of abuse of the system.