Deploy a rich communications app in 3 minutes with Ruby, Heroku, and Tropo | Hacker News Reader

Deploy a rich communications app in 3 minutes with Ruby, Heroku, and Tropo

tropo.heroku.com

25 pointsakalsey8 comments

Compared to Twilio, Tropo has an awful API. Also, a few features Tropo publicizes (esp. to do with IM) just don't work - you end up going to another Voxeo company to get semi-working functionality (IMified), but then some of that IM functionality doesn't work either, and IMified support is non-existant.

Personally, I hope that Twilio goes all-in on the "communications" part of "cloud communications". I'd gladly pay for working and supported IM endpoints with a sane API.

I'd love to hear what it is you don't like about Tropo's API.

Also, what IM issues did you have? IMified's tech is what's driving the Tropo IM integration, and I'm one of the IMified founders, so I can probably help you with you with that.

:) AIM is screwy on IMified - I've posted on the support site but haven't heard anything yet. Apparently I have an account online, but it's not connected to anything. See the post at: http://help.imified.com/discussions/problems/326-unable-to-a...

MSN works on IMified but doesn't work on Tropo - that's just odd, as you yourself said that the IMified system powers Tropo's IM integration (and the UI at Tropo hints at that from a third party perspective).

The bot.im users still aren't appearing on Google Talk, and I can't seem to add an additional account through GTalk directly.

BTW, though I didn't mention this in our Twitter chat earlier, I far prefer the API that IMified offers to that of Tropo.

Pretty cool how easy it is to deploy, but I wonder how much work went into the app first. Deploying with Heroku is always simple due to the pure git workflow (ie: git push and you're done).

Total time to create the app itself was about 6 hours. We spent more time on the web site and the video than we did the app. :)

Wow, that is pretty awesome. Not bad.

Who is the design/UI/UX guy at Heroku? His design sense is incredible.

Bragger!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com