You now have two Applets running on your own accounts: the call reminder from Marcus’s story and the playlist from Leila’s. You’ve built both without needing to know exactly what’s happening underneath. Now, let's dive into the details.
Look at either Applet you’ve built and you’ll find consistent pieces:
- Trigger: the event that starts everything. In your calendar Applet, that’s an event getting 15 minutes from its start time. In the YouTube Applet, it’s a video getting a like.
- Ingredient: a piece of information the Trigger hands to the Action. The notification in your calendar Applet reads “{{Title}} starts {{Starts}},” and the double curly brackets mark where an ingredient goes. The event’s title and start time are filled in fresh for each event. In the YouTube Applet, the video’s title is the Ingredient that Spotify searches for.
- Action: what happens as a result. In the calendar Applet, that’s the notification landing on your phone. In the YouTube Applet, it’s a track getting added to your playlist. One Trigger can have a single Action or, as you’ll see later, several.
Each time the Trigger happens, the Applet runs. IFTTT checks that the conditions match, passes the ingredients along, and the Action runs You can review what ran in your Activity Feed
Once you can spot those three pieces in any Applet, you can predict what it will do before it runs. That matters for the next chapter, where you look at the connections that power your Applets.