Interacting and exploring APIs is either the newest fad or a gold rush for new business, but one of the biggest things stopping me from using them is integration into my existing stable tools. webshell.io is another service which is hosting your code on an external service, leaving you vulnerable to fluctuations in their uptime or stability as a company. There may be new opportunities in turning this into a desktop application.
I would just allow for testing and building online ; want to run on your own server, just click export, pay something (or have a subscription) and there you go. Of course you open source the api wrappers completely to get more people using them outside your platform.
I appreciate the technical rigor required to make this kind of service stable and safe, but I am worried about the usefulness of the product / who would use it. Building APIs into my own abstractions in a real web application basically means I'll never use this myself. A more casual developer may use this to build simple mashups, or maybe hack out something for a hackathon, but beyond that why would I go through the trouble of figuring out how to integrate webshell with my own codebase? NinetyNine already mentioned this, but now I'm adding a new single point of failure and another web request, so I'm not quite sure how big the benefit is exactly.
Maybe it'll turn out that there's a huge need for some intermediate between IFTTT and vanilla API use, but I'm having a hard time seeing when.
It seems to work. This uses a REST service I recently wrote in node.js + mongodb.
Edit:
14 people click the link and hit Run, but no one changes the text? Come on. I wrote a second little app to track this at http://webshell.io/prototype/Njc5Z/8 just keep clicking Run to see it update, as people run the original app and hopefully enter their name or something.
Wow, 249 added. And a friendly mix of script injection, iframes, css, and image tags (had to disable the inline script tags because the redirects made people unable to see the data). Someone even changed the background image of the Webshell.IO interface itself.
It might be a good idea for the webshell guys to add some basic xss protection, but otherwise, I think we've proven this is a neat idea.
You may jest, but the traditional ordering, appending later material/writing to the bottom, is an artifact of the mechanics of handwriting and then typing-on-paper.
On screens, freshest/latest-on-top makes more sense, and is just as easy to effect. Inherently online forms, like blogs and newsfeeds, have already inverted their preferred mapping of time-to-vertical-position. I predict many interactive shells and chatrooms will also invert soon.
!reverse might sentences individual within order word
the even maybe years hundred a In ?knows Who
There's a lot of validity to what you say, but unfortunately this paradigm breaks because most languages are top-to-bottom.
As much as I'd love a bottom to top shell history for the reasons you describe, I'd end up scrolling in a zig-zag elevator pattern to read the command outputs.
This is of course not a criticism, just an observation.
'Languages are top to bottom', yes, but only because of the legacy mechanics of handwriting and then typewriter-rolls. (Hands or mechanism would obscure any lower text.)
As each generation spends more time with keyboarded/gestural/voice inputs for flexible screens, the old mechnical habit – append new at-bottom – will fade, with more applications embracing new-item (and new-line-insert) at-top.
Regarding shells, do you mean your eye tracking would have to zig-zag? If so, imagine a completely inverted shell/terminal, at the unit of individual lines. You'd only have to scrollbar-back in the exact same situations as in a classic terminal: when more than one screen of output resulted. And your eye tracking for smaller bursts of output will require the same reversals and vertical-magnitudes as before: just in the opposite direction. So once you habituate to the inversion, the differences that remain are:
(1) 'up' means 'newer', consistent with other screen-native scrollable information feeds
(2) your eyes' 'home row' stays near the top of your screen – closer to looking at the world above the screen, rather than the hands/keyboard/ground below
Both these seem like wins to me... far from slam-dunks, but enough to chip, chip, chip away at the traditional language practices over time.
I think what you're missing is that terminal output is nothing like the disjunct messages on twitter (and even there the inversion is terrible) but rather like the sentences of a novel.
We don't just "habituate to" reading backwards while everything else in the world still reads top-down.
And for that reason you don't break fundamental conventions like our natural reading direction that have evolved over centuries unless you have a tad bit less ridiculous justification than "looking at the world above the screen".
The next few generations will spend their entire lives reading and writing material exclusively for the screen, rather than paper. After that, I wouldn't even count on novels remaining earlier-writing-on-top. Pull-down/scroll-up for next will seem more of a 'natural reading direction' than habits based on quaint ink and paper – despite paper habits' several-thousand-years' head-start.
Let's check back in 100 years, we'll see who's right.
We've been reading top-down for well over 2000 years, since the very beginnings of writing, in almost all languages. If you really believe twitter and touchscreen-gadgets will overthrow that in not even one generation then you should absolutely share some of the kraut that you are smoking over there.
150 years ago, horse-drawn transport was the primary means of non-human-powered land transport... and had been for over 4,000 years. But by 50 years ago, not so much.
When a truly new technology arrives, things change a lot in just a few generations, with 'generation' meaning the 20-30 year average gap from birth to being a child-rearing adult.
Ok. So we have computers now, a truly new technology. And thus we will soon collectively decide that writing backwards is better because then we can look at the world above our screen better.
Yes, on second thought this is absolutely comparable to the invention of horseless carriage and makes perfect sense.
Cool idea, but this desperately needs a better way to deal with history. I mistyped
apis.tts("hello world");
as
api.tts("hello world");
and then I hit the up arrow (as this is how to go back to the last command on any other console I have every tried) and nothing happened. In fact, the only way to correct my mistake, seemed to be to retype the whole thing. I couldn't have come up with a better example of "dangling by a trivial feature" (http://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html).
