Launch HN: Text Blaze (YC W21) Programmable snippets to automate tedious typing https://ift.tt/3q5bT8w

Launch HN: Text Blaze (YC W21) Programmable snippets to automate tedious typing Hi HN! We’re Scott and Dan of Text Blaze ( https://blaze.today ). Text Blaze lets you create programmable text snippets that you can insert anywhere in Chrome by typing a brief shortcut. Before Text Blaze, we designed and built internal tools for thousands of sales and support reps at Google. As much as we tried though, our tools could never automate all repeated work for all users. We saw that there were always tech savvy reps who would build additional scripts to fill gaps and help save even more time. With Text Blaze, we wanted to create something for those kinds of reps to speed up and automate their boring repetitive work (and make it super easy for them to share with teammates). Text Blaze snippets help users to do this. You can start by taking all the repetitive messaging that they have and making it insertable with a few keystrokes. Many of our users easily save hours a month of typing just doing that. Technical users can go much further though. Our snippets can include form fields like text boxes or drop down menus in them and have dynamic fields with formulas. Users can use this to: - calculate a 15% service charge automatically when entering a price in a snippet text field. - or automatically pulling in the name of contact when sending a message in LinkedIn, - or saving data to a Google Spreadsheet every time they use a snippet, - or create patient diagnostic templates where the snippet may include a drop down to capture whether the patient is a smoker. If (and only if) the answer is yes, a follow up question and text box (number of cigarettes a day) will appear. Think of Text Blaze a little like Zapier meets Emmet. Some of the ways people use Text Blaze have amazed us. For example, the Customer Success department at a European delivery company, uses Text Blaze to standardize their comms with customers and drivers and automate much of the related processes. For example, their snippets read conversations with drivers in Intercom and automatically send a summary of the required information to a rep in the relevant Slack channel. Our most common users of Text Blaze are in customer support and recruiting, but we’re also seeing a lot of adoption in other areas like education (especially with the increased levels of remote learning with Covid). Text Blaze is free to use for many use cases and we have paid versions with additional features and improved collaboration for teams. Want to try Text Blaze out? You can get started by installing our extension from the Chrome Web Store ( https://ift.tt/2Mv195a... ). We’re a Chrome Extension as we see more and more users are spending all their time in Chrome and we want to be able to closely integrate with the different web applications they use. We would love your feedback on the Text Blaze here and your experiences with tools for end-user automation in general. What’s worked for you and where are there opportunities to improve existing approaches? February 5, 2021 at 09:40PM

Launch HN: MagicBell (YC W21) – embedded notification system for your product https://ift.tt/3aBsR8j

Launch HN: MagicBell (YC W21) – embedded notification system for your product Hey everyone! I am Hana, and along with my co-founder Josue, we are excited to launch MagicBell ( https://magicbell.io ). You can embed MagicBell in your web/mobile application to show users workflow notifications in-app and real-time. If the user is not online when you send them a notification, we can send them an email (or text). For example, a project management app can use MagicBell to show new tasks assigned to a user or tasks due soon. A code collaboration app will notify users of pull-requests that need their review. These notifications keep the workflow moving. Building a notification system is challenging. We built robust email notifications at my last startup SupportBee [0], and it took us weeks to nail down the threading, reply by email, unsubscription links, and notification preference management. When we wanted to add an in-app inbox, I felt that we were building a mini email client into our app. A well designed in-app experience needs real-time updates and state management (read/unread/archived) apart from a lot of UI polish. Not only do we save you months of work to begin with, but we also have an extensive product roadmap with features like email templates and grouping of notifications. Your customers will get a better experience each day without you having to invest in the development effort. Apart from customer-facing features, we plan to add a debug interface and analytics so you can get more visibility into your notifications. Our embeddable notification inbox is written using React and MobX, and we use Ably.io for real-time updates. We offer a React SDK [1] that lets you build a custom interface, and we use Storybooks to test our UI. Fun fact: you can see the entire catalog of React components we offer [2]. We extracted the network layer of our embeddable into a Javascript package so customers not using React can use that to build a custom interface [3]. We'll work on Vue & React-Native SDK next. Our backend is hosted on AWS. Thank you for reading. Please try out our product and send us your feedback, questions, and ideas. If you have built a notification system at work, we’d love to hear about your experience! [0] https://ift.tt/3pOAONE... [1] https://ift.tt/3cLf959 [2] https://ift.tt/3jlytaq... [3] https://ift.tt/39W5Rln February 5, 2021 at 09:26PM

Show HN: Socket.ly – A fast, global-scale solution for socket.io applications https://ift.tt/36OiEUG

Show HN: Socket.ly – A fast, global-scale solution for socket.io applications https://socket.ly February 5, 2021 at 05:02PM

Show HN: SVG Shape Generator – Create organic-looking shapes for your designs https://ift.tt/2O16r8C

Show HN: SVG Shape Generator – Create organic-looking shapes for your designs https://ift.tt/3aBcV5Z February 5, 2021 at 08:08PM

Show HN: I made yet another calculator for programmers https://ift.tt/2Mtfuz1

Show HN: I made yet another calculator for programmers https://ift.tt/362omCf February 5, 2021 at 08:09PM

Show HN: Inlets 3.0 RC1 https://ift.tt/3aDkSaM

Show HN: Inlets 3.0 RC1 https://ift.tt/36MJWeb February 5, 2021 at 06:16PM

Show HN: Graxel, a pocket doodling editor in pixel art https://ift.tt/3oQ4tVv

Show HN: Graxel, a pocket doodling editor in pixel art https://ift.tt/3rnlkQZ February 5, 2021 at 03:49PM