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Gmail Add-ons
- mericsson 10y agoVery neat, reminds me of Salesforce Lightning -- customizing UI across devices in client side Salesforce apps. https://developer.salesforce.com/lightning https://developer.salesforce.com/lightning
- mericsson 10y agoWill it support both iOS Google Inbox and Gmail apps?
- ncr100 10y agoExciting. I wonder if this is related to the 'instant app' tech?
- d4l3k 10y agoDoes this mean that we'll finally get an easy to use PGP integration in Gmail web and mobile? Can't wait!
- aspett 10y agoThis is what I instantly thought of too. Will be keeping a close eye on this!
- oh_sigh 10y agoSure, but the hard part for adoption isn't using the tools, but teaching people how to keep their private keys safe/secure
- arjie 10y agoI don't know man. Right now the hard part is using the tools. It's a pain in the ass. The last I tried FireGPG was the best and it wasn't terribly smooth flow either (no fault of it's own).
- ISL 10y agoAgreed. I knew how PGP worked, but still accidentally sent around my private instead of public key by mistake the first day I set things up. Information 'wants' to be free; it takes real effort to keep it contained.
- libertymcateer 10y agoMailvelope: https://www.mailvelope.com/en/ https://www.mailvelope.com/en/
- fdsfsafasfdas 10y agoIf only it worked on mobile.
- libertymcateer 10y agoVery good point.
- SquareWheel 10y agoI wonder if Google's End to End library will be available as a Gmail addon. It sounds like the perfect platform. https://github.com/google/end-to-end https://github.com/google/end-to-end
- tyingq 10y agoI have my doubts. This sounds like the replacement for "Gmail Contextual Gadgets", which currently only works on desktop gmail. They limit how much of the email body you can pull via the API (first 1000 characters only), and don't allow access to the attachments at all. https://developers.google.com/gmail/contextual_gadgets#using_pre-canned_extractors https://developers.google.com/gmail/contextual_gadgets#using... If the same reasons they did this (whatever it is/was) for contextual gadgets still apply, it wouldn't be useful for encryption.
- timvdalen 10y agoThis is a really big deal. Having recently written an extension that integrates with Gmail[1], I've found that InboxSDK[2] was a lifesaver. Having the power to do this with Google's consent _and_ have it be available on mobile devices is huge. I hope this solves the problem of conflicting Gmail extensions, I currently just have too many installed that don't place nice together. [1]: https://gmail-message-id-finder.co/ https://gmail-message-id-finder.co/ [2]: https://www.inboxsdk.com/ https://www.inboxsdk.com/
- ecaroth 10y agoLooks like it will from the screenshots (https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HeFnmVgMiJ8/WMDL3f4TQgI/AAAAAAAABiM/4WEvlteH1Q4wGfI8r4sNl2n5ELNVQyhbgCLcB/s1600/Gmail%2BAdd-ons%2Bstill.png https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HeFnmVgMiJ8/WMDL3f4TQgI/AAAAAAAAB...) - each app will have it's own icon and hooks into emails/threads. I too have built a few gmail integrated apps and this will be super nice and convenient.
- alooPotato 10y agoAgree that its a really big deal. Mobile support is huge. We actually built the inboxsdk that you are referring to. There are a ton of extensions built using it and >10M end users using apps built with it. We've worked really hard to make sure apps built with the SDK are compatible. If you have any examples of 2 extensions not playing nice, def let me know.
- timvdalen 10y agoFirst of all, thanks for InboxSDK! Looking at it now, it's actually mostly InboxSDK extensions that are conflicting with Gmelius and some other custom extensions. Having 10+ extensions all trying to modify the DOM of one site at the same time is bound to give some problems :). Curious to see if Streak will switch to this new official way, although it seems that a lot of the stuff you're doing won't be available to Add-ons.
- alooPotato 10y agoGmelius is actually using parts of the SDK. But they are really aggressive and do some DOM manipulation. In general we hope that users of the InboxSDK never need to actually touch the DOM ever. The SDK handles coordination across extensions. Ofcourse extension don't have to abide by this and hence the conflicts. As for Streak, we're planning on a mixed approach. The add-ons from Google support very few UI entry points (at least for now). Streak's entire UI only lives in Gmail so we need a lot more integrations. We'll use the Google sanctioned way when possible and fall back on the extension as we currently have now for the other cases.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- amelius 10y agoI'd rather Google made this an open standard. Because right now, I'm feeling it starts to sound a little too much like "embrace, extend, extinguish".
- joshuamorton 10y ago(disc: googler) How could you make an open standard for this? Do you mean an open standard for apps-in-email? Or an open standard for doing things in gmail?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- kuschku 10y agoNot OP, but: an open standard for apps-in-email could also be used by Thunderbird/rainloop/roundcube/etc. And not just by GMail.
- amelius 10y agoI meant an open standard for apps-in-email, but then again, interoperability between apps is something that probably should be handled more generically at the OS level. Coming back to my remark, email is one of the great federated protocols of the web, and I would really hate it if a big company would ruin it by adding proprietary extensions.
- icebraining 10y agoThis seems to be extensions to the client, not to the messages themselves. The extensions to messages they did was Email Markup, and they do use standard/open formats from schema.org (which is developed by multiple orgs, not just Google).
- misterbowfinger 10y agoThis is like, 5 years too late, and it's arguably the reason Slack is succeeding in killing Google Hangouts & Gmail as communication tools.
- ecaroth 10y agoThere's still a shit ton of companies whose products live extensively (or exclusively) in Gmail - not to mention the examples they give are use cases that you would not use in slack. Slack is certainly winning as an external communication tool, but email/gmail dominates external (and customer) communication for gSuite-using companies.
- newtown2017 10y agoWhat if my customer is not G Suite User ?
- askvictor 10y agoThey just use email. These add one augment the email client (Gmail) not the email messages themselves.
- antman 10y agoI have not read the article, so if someone can TLDR is this a product being announced or a product being canceled?
- ecaroth 10y agoYou can now build native add-ons for Gmail that work on desktop/mobile gmail, with native UI and hooks without needing to write hacky chrome extnesions.
- narsil 10y agoThis is awesome. I developed Chrome/Firefox browser extensions that connected Gmail attachments with cloud storage in the past, and hacking through Gmail's DOM always threw any SLA we could provide out the window. It's even better that this will run on Android and iOS as well, which truly makes all the "Gmail extensions" from developers such as myself production-ready.
- gmisra 10y agoDoes anybody know what happens when an add-on augmented e-mail is opened outside of Gmail (or, presumably, Inbox)? There is a huge difference between: Google is enhancing e-mail in a way that makes e-mail better for everybody. and Google is migrating GMail to be another walled garden collaborative workflow tool that happens to have a very good e-mail client build in.
- ucaetano 10y agoIf you look at the examples, they all look like adding extra functionality to your inbox, not to the content of the emails you send. So it doesn't sound like "I'll send you this email that you can only access if you have gmail AND this specific add-ons", more like "when you open an email, the add-on shows relevant information from your internal CRM system as well as canned responses".
- johnsmith21006 10y agoThis is a great idea. Google is like on Aderall lately.
- Animats 10y agoAre you allowed to write something that removes Google ads?
- true_religion 10y agoNope, but you could always pay Google for GMail and go without ads.
- jonknee 10y agoNo need for anything other than a standard ad blocker...
- rasz_pl 10y agoand tracking of links inside emails
- imglorp 10y agoI don't know, guys. Inbox was nifty at first but it positively crawls now. Any input action takes several seconds, at best, to process on a fast machine, sometimes much more. Loading Inbox is about 30s. It's maybe 20x slower than straight gmail classic. Plugins will just slow it more?
- askvictor 10y agoWill this even work for inbox? I'd almost guess that they're aligning Gmail as an enterprise product and inbox as consumer.
- grmarcil 10y agoStrange, my experience with Inbox is nowhere near that bad. It is noticeably slower than Gmail classic, but load time is ~2s and actions like search take a fraction of a second. This is all on a 2012 MBP.
- b2600 10y agoGmail is slow to load compared to others. Notably, FastMail. I abandoned Inbox a while ago because of load time. Coming close to abandoning Gmail too. Takes way to long to load. This happens for me on low end laptops AND high end desktops.
- rikkus 10y ago12 seconds to load fully here (that's 11.90 seconds too long - can't they store some stuff in local storage or...?) - and of course it's not really usable until it's fully loaded. You could start trying to type but it'll not do anything, or stuff will move. Opening the 'Updates', er, 'section' with 2 emails in it took 2 seconds, which is silly. I love the flow of Inbox but I'm seriously considering going back to a local client. Are there any good ones left these days? I liked mutt, but using it with an IMAP mailbox made it a bit clunky. I just need to work /fast/, without crashes, without spam, and preferably with vi keys and programmabil... never mind the last two, I can live with the speed, stability and spam-free parts.
- 10y ago
- josteink 10y agoAnd just as I completed a WebExtension based integration. Awesome! /s Seriously though: I was considering using Gmail contextual gadgets, but it seems google has just dumped those, left the tooling and admin panels not to work and the documentation to rot at least 3 revisions earlier. Looking into it was a complete waste of time, and seeing this now, I'm going to guess soon to be deprecated. I wonder how long until Google repeats the history with this one. I'm honestly not sure I'd dare jump on another Google tech like this.
- icebraining 10y agoSeriously though: I was considering using Gmail contextual gadgets, but it seems google has just dumped those, left the tooling and admin panels not to work and the documentation to rot at least 3 revisions earlier. That's in line with my experience. We had a gadget working a few years back (a button to create a ticket, for our support teams); a year and half ago we had to make an update, and the gadget simply never came back - even after we reverted. And the tools are useless to identify these problems.
- whizzkid 10y agoSorry to be the one that has negative feelings about it. Email is one of those rare concepts that is really hard to change or enhance. I can easily see Google abandoning this feature in 5 years. People need email service just because of the email function, nothing more than that. It's concept clearly has some limitations (attachment sizes, layout inconsistencies and so on) but it also doesn't have any deal-breaker problems. Introducing external services integration to email sounds like taking a huge risk. How people manage their invoices, to-do lists and other stuff is changing faster than ever. These add-ons will require active development all the time to keep themselves up-to-date. As a developer, I wouldn't risk investing in this feature.
- phailhaus 10y agoIt sounds like you're against it because there's a huge market for it...
- quickben 10y agoNah he's right. They have a history of axing stuff with 0 care about personal or corporate users. Search 'Google graveyard' , etc. There may be a huge market, but your dev time will earn income for not many months/years. I'd rather see my products live longer than that, and me focusing on growth, than constantly trying to restart development just because Google worries much more about their bottom line, than their users. But, to each his own.
- eli 10y agoAn API that might go away in 5 years is much much better than hacking the DOM. I wouldn't base a business around either, but I can think of some fun and useful add-ons I could build
- libertymcateer 10y ago> As a developer, I wouldn't risk investing in this feature. Are you developing or working on anything related to email?
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- soheil 10y agoSo two things come to mind: - this reminds of the ancient Labs feature in Gmail where you could add stuff like favicon that shows unread email count - is there going to be a Gmail plugin store?
- fiatjaf 10y agoYou didn't click the link, that's clear. But hey, Gmail Labs is still there!
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- OJFord 10y agoThat's hardly fair: the linked page doesn't mention Labs once. > But hey, Gmail Labs is still there! I'm not even sure what makes you say that like there's no chance of it changing as a result of this?
- tyingq 10y agoIt already sort of exists as "Gmail Contextual Gadgets": https://developers.google.com/gmail/contextual_gadgets https://developers.google.com/gmail/contextual_gadgets It was tied to the Google Apps marketplace as you suggest. This sounds like that idea extended such that it works on mobile. And the interface looks cleaner. Also, FWIW, contextual gadgets is dusty, unmaintained, docs out of date, docs have broken links, etc. Basically abandonware.
- IanCal 10y agoThis happens very regularly for me, Google's own internal links are terribly broken. I'm on an android device, using chrome. I'm clicking a link on a Google site, a call to action to sign up. I get a page that's not a signup page but another overview, and has a broken image in. Usually it's broken links on help pages but this is just useless. How do I sign up? I want to build on your platform! Please stop making the first interactions I have with you broken!
- martin1975 10y agoA PGP add on built into gmail would be nice .. They have been promising it for years now, seems they have trouble delivering it.
- forgotpwtomain 10y ago> seems they have trouble delivering it. More like seems it's not good for their core-business to deliver it?
- ino 10y agoWhen is google adding missing useful functionality such as "schedule email send"?
- alooPotato 10y agoProbably soon - they already added snoozing an email to Inbox edit: if you want it now, we offer that functionality in gmail and inbox soon: www.streak.com
- Keyframe 10y agoAgreed. I use Boomerang for that now.
- calcsam 10y agoGreat feature, only a few years overdue...
- fiatjaf 10y agoSomeone should really develop an app that was just the add-ons, without the email part. Some personal dashboard from where you could receive notifications of all sorts and perform actions on them.
- gameshot911 10y agoA little off topic, but anyone else find those example gifs exceptionally fluid and intuitive? I really liked the way the blue dot indicated movement, clicks, etc. A very elegant solution for demoing a touch-based system.
- OJFord 10y agoI found it a little disingenuous - in reality, half that screen is going to be taken up by an on-screen keyboard, and typing is nothing like that quick; that little blue dot would be moving from key to key to key to key.
- SquareWheel 10y agoEh honestly, I think posting 3MB of images is a bit antithetical to their goals of making everything faster. Gifs are basically the worst format possible for this.
- shp0ngle 10y agoI still like Google's Inbox. Which seems like a forgotten and abandoned child sometimes.... But it works great for me. Makes it easier to wage through the tons of stupid mails. Talking about Mobile version here. The web version is not good.
- euyyn 10y ago> Which seems like a forgotten and abandoned child sometimes Isn't it first to get features like Smart Reply?
- thetrumanshow 10y agoI'll probably setup a Slack channel for those interested in talking more about this. I'm not part of the program yet, but very interested in it, and I'd be happy to meet you if you have similar interests. btwelchy_gmail
- yitchelle 10y agoI read that Google is trying to engage developers and allowing them to market their add-ons via the G Suite market place. Has anyone had any financial success via developing these type of add-ons?
- tyingq 10y agoI doubt much direct revenue would come this route. But, if you sell CRM software, or trouble ticket software, the integration might swing a potential buyer.
- neotek 10y agoDid I understand right that add-ons also work in the iOS app? How are they implementing that, especially since Apple recently said you're not allowed to load custom code on the fly? Sorry if this comes across as ignorant, but I have no app dev experience whatsoever so I have no clue how any of this stuff is done at the moment.
- mercer 10y agoFrom what I understand Apple relaxed at the very least the enforcement of this rule.
- btown 10y agoMy understanding is that on the fly code loading is still allowed if (1) the loaded code is written in, or compiled to, JavaScript, and (2) no native hooks it can call allow it to call arbitrary native functions by name, which was being misused to access hidden/proprietary APIs that could break during updates. Which makes sense if Apple wants to guarantee "our updates won't get blamed for broken apps as long as our public APIs are backwards compatible."
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- secfirstmd 10y agoI wonder how this might work for easier PGP with something like Mailvelope
- nthcolumn 10y agoI'd just like it stop telling me my chromium is not up to date. :/
- zzbzq 10y agoSeems like a lot of posters here not catching on, this seems to be a parity thing with the new cross-platform, HTML-based MS Office Add-ins which are pretty sweet and have been out for a while. Unusual for Microsoft to be out in front of this since usually they like to follow examples.
- jfkw 10y agoWould this API support manipulation of message composition format? I would really like a gmail add-on that eliminated quoted text in replies by default, with a button to "reply with quoted text" for the rare occasions when it is wanted.
- Nullabillity 10y agoWhat about people using Gmail outside of Gsuite?
- siva_narayanan 10y agoAnybody know when the developer preview / early access for Gmail Add-ons is likely to happen?