Thanks for hunting us Matt! We're very excited to share Dexter with the @ProductHunt community as well.
I wanted to mention as well that Dexter is a completely open platform that allows developers to use git to publish their own NodeJS modules to execute and distribute without having to worry about servers, scalability, security, and other points of friction that get in the way of building your integration driven apps. Additionally, Dexter is an end to end experience - once you create an app, Dexter automatically generates a page that you can share with anyone to use with a single button click!
Some use cases that we've seen people use Dexter for are:
- Slackbots and slash commands
- Web scrapers with SMS/Email alerts (like weather, transit, page updates, etc)
- RSS Aggregators
We're really early in this process and hoping to get lots of input from the Product Hunt community so thanks in advance for all your feedback!
@danielilkovich Looking forward to giving this a spin. How do you feel Dexter fits in with other API connectors out there? e.g. Zapier, Bipio, Yahoo Pipes (RIP).
@mattellsworth i hadn't heard of bip.io, really cool. to me a main difference is that Dexter is completely open, and you can let people customize the services you build. @bthdonohue wanted to build an @instapaper integration with @slackhq, so he created two modules, one to get the last URL shared in slack, and the other to add a URL to instapaper.
@danielilkovich I know that now I can customize brian's app with my credentials, which is great. can I also use the slack and instapaper modules he built, or are they private to him?
@mattellsworth just like @matthartman mentioned we are a completely open platform and allow anyone to upload custom NodeJS code to create modules. In the coming months, we'll also be releasing many collaboration features (e.g. module sharing, remixing apps) that we will build a Dexter community around and draw a clear line between us and the other products you mentioned. As developers contribute more modules to the system, we imagine a world where power users can swap modules in and out to meet their exact specifications and in the cases where there isn't a module built yet, be able to request it with a very succinct spec centered around universally understandable inputs & outputs.
Finally, we're firm believers that in order for this ecosystem to work we need users that can use a Dexter App without ever seeing the developer/power user side of the house. So every Dexter app gets a user friendly configuration screen, so you can share your creations with all of your friends without having to worry about explaining the ins and outs. In a way, we're providing a framework around the weekend hack.
@danielilkovich Very cool. The approach feels a lot like Blockspring in that you can create your own node modules. Would love to chat after I get a chance to mess with it some more.
It would be really really interesting if you could give people that know how to write spreadsheet style functions, the ability to create modules and abstract away the Node learning curve. For now you could probably just go through all the modules that Yahoo Pipes had and add them. Will be messing around with Dexter for sure.
@rrhoover Yahoo Pipes is perhaps my single most used Yahoo service.. and then it was no more. Sad panda. Then possibly Dexter makes me a happy panda. :)
@danielilkovich, @justfarg, and @bilko have been working on a really interesting new product @betaworks launching today. Dexter is a developer platform that makes it easy to build apps that connect third-party APIs using a visual interface.
For example, I made a bookmarklet that texts me the URL of the site I'm looking at. So when I'm on @producthunt on desktop and see an iPhone app I like, I can quickly text the URL to my phone and download it. I've also seen some really cool slackbots built with Dexter.
I've been looking forward to sharing Dexter with the @ProductHunt community, and am excited for feedback :)
@luisobo Definitely. I'd say that we're more focused on the asynchronous use case for now -- an event driven 'invisible app' that does things for you in the background and pushes out a notification to you when it's finished. Though we are going to address the synchronous request/response use case in the future!
I'm a huge Dexter fanboy!
I participated in their hackathon a few weeks back at Betaworks, and was super inspired, not only from what I was able to create so seamlessly, but by what I saw the devs and non-devs around me build in just a few short hours. I've since been building little integrations here and there whenever I think of one.
Think of Dexter as an open source IFTTT - really great product. To boot, the team building it out really know what they're doing through and through, from backend to packaging to user experience. A+, would Dexter again!
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