But yes for a desktop you are right. "credit card details and download"

Maybe it'll turn out that there's a huge need for some intermediate between IFTTT and vanilla API use, but I'm having a hard time seeing when.

It seems to work. This uses a REST service I recently wrote in node.js + mongodb.

Edit:

14 people click the link and hit Run, but no one changes the text? Come on. I wrote a second little app to track this at http://webshell.io/prototype/Njc5Z/8 just keep clicking Run to see it update, as people run the original app and hopefully enter their name or something.

It might be a good idea for the webshell guys to add some basic xss protection, but otherwise, I think we've proven this is a neat idea.

  printed in any other way...
  would want their shell output
  I never understood why anyone

  Yes, what a great innovation!

On screens, freshest/latest-on-top makes more sense, and is just as easy to effect. Inherently online forms, like blogs and newsfeeds, have already inverted their preferred mapping of time-to-vertical-position. I predict many interactive shells and chatrooms will also invert soon.

  !reverse might sentences individual within order word 
  the even maybe years hundred a In ?knows Who

This is of course not a criticism, just an observation.

As each generation spends more time with keyboarded/gestural/voice inputs for flexible screens, the old mechnical habit – append new at-bottom – will fade, with more applications embracing new-item (and new-line-insert) at-top.

Regarding shells, do you mean your eye tracking would have to zig-zag? If so, imagine a completely inverted shell/terminal, at the unit of individual lines. You'd only have to scrollbar-back in the exact same situations as in a classic terminal: when more than one screen of output resulted. And your eye tracking for smaller bursts of output will require the same reversals and vertical-magnitudes as before: just in the opposite direction. So once you habituate to the inversion, the differences that remain are:

(1) 'up' means 'newer', consistent with other screen-native scrollable information feeds

(2) your eyes' 'home row' stays near the top of your screen – closer to looking at the world above the screen, rather than the hands/keyboard/ground below

Both these seem like wins to me... far from slam-dunks, but enough to chip, chip, chip away at the traditional language practices over time.

We don't just "habituate to" reading backwards while everything else in the world still reads top-down.

And for that reason you don't break fundamental conventions like our natural reading direction that have evolved over centuries unless you have a tad bit less ridiculous justification than "looking at the world above the screen".

Let's check back in 100 years, we'll see who's right.

We've been reading top-down for well over 2000 years, since the very beginnings of writing, in almost all languages. If you really believe twitter and touchscreen-gadgets will overthrow that in not even one generation then you should absolutely share some of the kraut that you are smoking over there.

When a truly new technology arrives, things change a lot in just a few generations, with 'generation' meaning the 20-30 year average gap from birth to being a child-rearing adult.

Yes, on second thought this is absolutely comparable to the invention of horseless carriage and makes perfect sense.

  apis.tts("hello world");

  api.tts("hello world");