I've always thought union organizing was ripe for some good ol' tech innovation. It seems to be run in such an old school way, right now.
Very cool idea, and seems very flushed out already! Best of luck, and I will let all my friends who complain about unfair working conditions know about this!
I recently joined this team from Azure. Lots of senior AWS and Joyent folks here as well. Send me a mail at joe dot levy at oracle dot com and I can connect you with the right folks. Same goes for anyone else interested!
Yes, using the generated API is the issue, not generating one.
As for authenticated sites, as long as the underlying generated module keeps track of cookies received in responses and sends those cookies on subsequent API calls, just like a browser would, it should work fine for "normal" websites that use regular cookies for remembering if user is logged in. Gargl modules generated as PowerShell, or as Javascript (and used in a WinJS project) do this "cookie remembering" today. It could also of course be possible for the user to remember the cookie themselves in their code (after it gets the raw response from the API call), and then pass that cookie into any subsequent API calls manually.
Very cool, but why come up with a new API schema rather than use an open standard like OData (http://www.odata.org/)? Then Alpaca would be compatible with a bunch of APIs that already exist today. In fact, something like this (generating client libraries from APIs) may exist for OData already, but if it does, I've only seen it for .NET and OData (Visual Studio 'Add Service Reference').
This is actually pretty similar to a side project I've been working on called Gargl (Generic API Recorder and Generator Lite) (https://github.com/jodoglevy/gargl). Haven't gotten around to doing a Show HN post yet, but would love any feedback or to combine efforts. Basically it lets you generate an API for websites that don't have APIs publically available, by looking at how a web page / form submission of that web site interacts with the web server. You record web requests you make while normally browsing a website via a chrome extension, parameterize them as needed, and then output your "API" to a template file. Then this template file can be converted to a client library in a programming language of your choosing.
You could build my source and deploy to your system yourself and it would work, but this doesn't seem like a very "for the masses" solution. Plenty of people out there who want the security of using open source code that others have reviewed, but don't know anything about development to be able to build that code themselves.
Yes, I will probably open source it soon. But couldn't one just open source the code, say that's the code the app is using, and then change the code the app is using to do something malicious? As long as I don't check in the new code, no one would be the wiser.
Not that I'm planning to do that, but is there a solution to this issue?
OP Update:
They issued a take down request to Microsoft, which required they fill out a form on specific infringement of the app. I'm actually glad they did this, as Microsoft has a formal process for reinstatement of Windows 8 apps that previously may have infringed, and this way I have a list of things they want changed without having to officially be on the record communicating with them directly (where they could use anything I write against me).
Complaints:
They have copied the POF icon and used it as their own.
This application is passing off that it is an Application from Plentyoffish Media. They use our trademark in their description. Also, the word "Many" in title is clearly a play off of "Plenty Of." We have many other trademarks in many other jurisdictions for this and related trademarks.
This is fundamentally incorrect. Only Online Services Division (Bing) loses money. Everything else makes money, and Windows definitely makes more than "a little bit."
Operating Income by Division FY13 Q3:
Windows: $3.46 B
Server and Tools: $1.98 B
Online Services: -$262 M (loss)
Business: $4.1 B
Entertainment and Devices: $342 M
It is interesting that people perceive so many businesses at Microsoft as "failing" even when they have healthy income and growth year after year.
It wasn't just Google changing their rankings (to manually put their own results ahead of competitors), they were also scraping data from these competitors and displaying it as their own, which they continued to do after the FTC told them to stop.
Good to see Apple not contributing to the "Macs can't get viruses," "Macs can't get spam" misinformation any longer. Users need to learn to defend themselves, not just rely on the OS, which can't really protect users from phishing attacks. Reminds me of this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4004154
I think one issue with finding projects working on this already is that its hard to explain the concept to search for. Is this Facebook feature called "social reader"? Is it called "frictionless sharing?" "Open graph?" Users don't know how to name the feature in a way to search meaningfully for a way to block it, and there's no standard name among developers to search for preexisting efforts to contribute to.
I managed to find the "Unsocial Reader" while searching for previous efforts. I did not find "Frictionless", maybe because I didn't search for "frictionless sharing blocker," because that's not a term I thought to use.
In the case of Unsocial Reader, I saw it was doing Google "I'm feeling lucky" searches based on the title and figured the way I was doing it was more streamlined for the user because it was actually based on the article URL, and since my extension searches for a URL specific to Facebook (uiconnect.php) no changes to the DOM by app developers would bypass the fact that it still has to go through that Facebook URL.
In terms of cases it covers, it has worked every time I needed it to while I was on Facebook, but yes that was the extent of the testing I did. I think it is unfair to claim that all other projects besides your own work in only 5% of cases, considering the Unsocial Reader has almost 3x the users of Frictionless and a better star rating in the Chrome Web Store. Also, since a few sites represent the vast majority of the open graph links on Facebook (ex Yahoo), blocking their installers is most important to most users.
This was a weekend project of the mentality "I can get 80% of the results with 20% of the effort." It's something I threw together, just to solve my own problems (with Facebook and with being unable to find a plugin that fixed the problem). But now that Frictionless has been brought to my attention, I will certainly look over the source and see if there's a way I can contribute. Thanks.
Interesting...I certainly could be wrong or the functionality may have changed since I last looked in to it. I do know for a fact that when I click "no" on the Yahoo links it brings me back to Facebook, not the article. I'm in the US.
As far as I know, from working on an open graph app, you can either not prompt for an install of the app, or require an install of the app. You can't ask for an install but not require it to see the content.
Unfortunately, a lot of big news sites go with the force method, including Yahoo.
OP here. I have never worked on a GreaseMonkey script before...only used a Chrome extension because it seemed to fit the project requirements and it was the first thing that came to mind.
That said, I did find it extremely easy to create a Chrome extension. Really nice to have access to the DOM straight through javascript. Check out the source code for this extension...only took a few lines to write the actual logic
OP here. Actually, if you hit No or Close, none of these apps will redirect you to the article. Not possible with Facebook's current implementation. I know because I've worked on one of these Open Graph apps for The Duke Chronicle.
Only possibilities are, when the user clicks the link, to either bring them straight to the article, or ask them to install the app and if they hit "Yes," bring them to the article. Not possible to show the install app dialog box but not force an install in order to be redirected to the article. I wish it was though!
In terms of setting it to "only me" for sharing, yes that definitely works. But you're still giving the app read access to some of your Facebook info, and many users won't even think to change the setting to "only me" unfortunately.
Very cool idea, and seems very flushed out already! Best of luck, and I will let all my friends who complain about unfair working conditions know about this!