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Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
151–160 of 165 posts
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#152An semantic equivalent to an "#include" or "using" statement that looked for the library on a central repository instead the local disk, automatically managing caching and versioning.
maven?
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#153Gmail. But more than a specific API, it would be cool if websites simply provided an XML(/JSON/etc) version for every urls. Eg, http://news.ycombinator.com/item.xml?id=955077 would return the data in this page in XML format. This would be pretty simply to create (at least as read-only API), handle the situations where people resort to HTML scraping and effectively remove the need for API docs.
GMail has APIs - POP3 and IMAP.
There's also RSS, but all of these provide access to mail functionality, while Gmail is a lot more than that. The uses I have in mind are closer to Google Labs' "Unsend", or having web service-like access to moving stuff around in gmail, creating alternate UI etc.
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#154Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Realtime (i.e. in game stats) or just up to date player, team, league stats. I think the leagues fight hard to disallow this although they have recently lost a couple high profile lawsuits.
Again, the company I work for offers this kind of data but you have to pay for it. We have lots of clients who run fantasy baseball web sites and make use of our real-time stats feeds to update their games.
Do you ever have any issues with leagues about using their data? I figured something like this would be a good idea, to format stats etc, but thought I might get in trouble for using "their" stats inappropriately or whatever.
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#156Subway. On the stations here they have displays, that show in how many minutes the next train will arrive (which is real-time data). Would be cool if they broadcast this information on the net, you could see if you need to hurry to the station or not.
Same, but for ALL public transportation. The number of iphone apps/sms notifications that would pop up from it would be astounding.
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#157An API into the postal system of every country.
Can you elaborate?
I've been building a little side thing called snailpad (http://www.snailpad.com) and have a beta API running for some of the paying customers at this point.
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#158Free or low-cost tv schedule api. Currently one has to pay about $500 per market/region per month.
Not exactly an API (just data), but it's cheap (USD20/year): http://www.schedulesdirect.org/
Too many restrictions on the use of the data:
Re: Ask HN: What APIs do you wish existed?
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Who would have guessed that MS would be more developer-friendly than G? Anyone who's done Microsoft-based development? MS is incredibly developer-friendly compared to many platform vendors. It's a point of business strategy for them (if memory serves me, that's what Ballmer's infamous "developers, developers, developers, developers" thing was about in context). Just don't try and mix in any technology from one of MS'…
True, they are developer friendly. .NET is a good platform. It's extensive and well documented. There is innovation in C# as well. But the purpose of all that goodness is to make you sell their licenses. Where Oracle has their salesforce, Microsoft has their developers to do the selling for them. Unfortunately their licensing is from an era that has come and gone. Building software that uses things like Windows Serve…
You can build on their stuff but you won't scale and you won't grow, not because their technology doesn't scale, but because their licensing doesn't scale.
What about their licensing for Azure? Does that scale or is it more of the same?