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Show HN: InboxSDK by Streak (YC S11) – Build Apps inside Gmail
- matthall28 11y agoWe've been building our Gmail app over at http://CloseFox.com http://CloseFox.com with InboxSDK and have really been enjoying it! Definitely a lot better than using gmail.js
- kartikt 11y agoCreator of gmail.js here. Can confirm
- alooPotato 11y agoGmail.js is pretty great too. We're trying to take a slightly more higher level approach but there's def still a few things we're missing that gmail.js does have.
- conorgil145 11y agoAny chance of collaboration between the two projects?
- wingerlang 11y agoYour intro video is waaaay too long, and after looking at it I am not even sure it was an intro video. The email written in the beginning, it never came back to it. Lost interest halfway through, I think (there are no controls).
- BorisMelnik 11y agoI've had an idea for a Gmail app I've been wanting to build for a while now. Super easy but I need some help getting it built. This is pretty much a layup in my opinion.
- ttaylorr 11y agoI'm confused why people see this as "revolutionary". At the core of it, this is just an abstraction around DOM-hacking. Anyone could have done this, and it is foolish to call such an "innovation" revolutionary.
- garry 11y agoIt's a well maintained schlep of a DOM hacking API that makes complex interaction in a hugely important installed base of 1 billion users (previously nearly impossible) possible. Just because you understand the mechanism doesn't mean you should demean the herculean efforts of other good hackers. Also innovation isn't the idea. Innovation is actually implementing it.
- dkokelley 11y agoI have a hard time following this reasoning. Of course almost anything new could have been done by anyone. The nature of invention and innovation is that someone figured something out. People could have (and did) say the same thing about Facebook, Dropbox, and a number of other "revolutionary" companies/products. What matters is that someone did it and is packaging it in a way to solve problems and improve the lives of others. Perhaps "revolutionary" is just marketing fluff, but why get hung up on subjective semantics?
- alooPotato 11y agoFounder of Streak (YC S11) here - we built the InboxSDK using all of the work we've put into making Streak work great inside of Gmail. Happy to answer any questions about the SDK.
- ahmetmsft 11y agoWhy don't you host the source code on GitHub?
- squiggy22 11y agoWhat prevents Google closing the door on this?
- gauravphoenix 11y agoI think they(infosdk) are offering an easy way to create browser extensions to interact with Gmail. Google will need to do something really intrusive to break their SDK
- alooPotato 11y agoWell, nothing really. But thats true for almost anything. We think you can trust the platform because we're fundamentally making Gmail better and more valuable to Google's users. There are a handful of successful businesses (like Streak and others) already built on top of gmail and have been for years. These venture backed companies already trust their business to be on top of Gmail. We're just making the process of building these apps waaaay easier. We take security and performance really really seriously. Because our SDK helps you build Chrome extensions for Gmail, Google can (and has) shut down shady apps from the Chrome Webstore, so they don't have to shutdown the entire platform to get rid of a bad actors.
- squiggy22 11y agoA well rounded answer, but I'll pass for now. If Google really believed in your ethos of making the software more valuable via third parties, their platform wouldn't require dom hacks that could break without notice. i.e. they'd open up their own APIs to make building these sorts of apps themselves. I absolutely commend you for what you are doing, I just wouldn't be willing as a developer to dip my toes in that particular water to spend the time developing something they could rip apart and break. As a side note, the documentation page is broken on Mac Safari 8 on OSX Javascript error: TypeError: undefined is not a function (evaluating 'reference.endsWith('()')')
- keithwarren 11y agoAny plans to support exchange in future?
- alooPotato 11y agoSorry not at the moment. Actually Outlook has a really great API to write JS/HTML based apps for their desktop client, web client and mobile client. See https://dev.outlook.com/MailAppsGettingStarted/GetStarted https://dev.outlook.com/MailAppsGettingStarted/GetStarted
- mnkypete 11y agoSome marketing: We are actually providing a Javascript wrapper for most of the official Outlook API, much more fully featured (incl. ribbons): http://developer.yasoon.com/ http://developer.yasoon.com/
- ttruong 11y agoWe rebuilt the Gmail integration portion of our Screenleap extension using InboxSDK and reduced the size of our implementation from a bunch of files to 120 lines of code (the InboxSDK integration portion is only 10 lines). Would've saved a month of work if this was available the first time around! Besides not having to keep up with breaking changes in Gmail, another really nice benefit of using InboxSDK is that you don't have to keep updating your extension to make sure that it plays nice with other extensions. This was an unexpected and on-going source of development work for us previously. Looking forward to the Google Calendar integration :)
- venuzr 11y agoAny tips on how to integrate this with FE frameworks like Angular? Unit/e2e testing? Thanks for making this.
- OmarIsmail 11y agoCofounder of Streak and helped write a lot of the InboxSDK. I can't give a definitive answer right now because we don't use Angular and thus don't have much experience with it. If you're able to specify a DOM node as the root of an Angular instance then you should be able to make it work. If you try to make the top html tag as your root you'll probably run into a bad time particularly if other extensions make the same assumption. One major difference between writing an app for Gmail vs your own app is that multiple apps can and usually are running at the same time. This was one of the main motivations behind the SDK since many of our bug reports were a result from extension compatibility issues. We do e2e testing with selenium/webdriver - so it's definitely doable. Tip for e2e testing is to pay for some extra Google Apps accounts so you can run your tests in parallel.
- wslh 11y agoReading https://www.inboxsdk.com/terms https://www.inboxsdk.com/terms it says this SDK is royalty-free. Is there any additional important licensing issue to take into account before using it?
- slackstation 11y agoYou give the code in a .js file that you include in a browser plugin but, you don't state clearly whether this is or is not an open source project. The .js file has no license in it either. File: https://www.inboxsdk.com/build/inboxsdk.js https://www.inboxsdk.com/build/inboxsdk.js Then I see the github page: https://github.com/InboxSDK/ https://github.com/InboxSDK/ There is no InboxSDK project but, just two example chrome plugins using the inboxSDK. All the trappings and mechanics of open source without the actual source and an actual open source license. Are you guys just testing this to see if you can productize it? Or are you going to go all the way and open source this?
- obvio 11y agosome more info on this here https://www.inboxsdk.com/terms https://www.inboxsdk.com/terms
- alooPotato 11y agoThanks for this. We're adding licenses to our examples that we have on GitHub and we're also adding a pointer from our inboxsdk.js file to our terms of service. Over a longer time horizon, we plan on open sourcing the entire implementation of the InboxSDK but just not yet.
- kuschku 11y agoYou do realize that any client-side code – especially with the universal right to decompile and adapt code in the EU – is essentially open source anyway?
- oneweekwonder 11y agoI understand why this view point can be wrong. But instead of just downvoting him. Why not give a link or two, to correct him?
- jsprogrammer 11y agoI guess you don't care to provide a link or two either? (I don't know what you're talking about.)
- wslh 11y agoIf you are interested in this kind of hacks you can't miss Add-In-Express [1] and my company's Windows Live Mail, Windows Mail, and Outlook Express APIs that created SDKs around closed source products for more than 10 years. [1] https://www.add-in-express.com/ https://www.add-in-express.com/
- flawless 11y agoStreak's InboxSDK is the missing link to augmenting gmail's functionality. Gmail is a rich product that always seems to be changing silently. The Streak team does a fantastic job maintaining the SDK so that their changes automatically get pulled in, no need for us to release a new version of the extension. We used InboxSDK to create part of our DocSend Chrome extension. Our power users who are in gmail 24/7 can't live without it. Thanks to Streak for helping us enable our user base and keep happy customers happy! :)
- Avalaxy 11y agoCan anyone explain how this is different from Google's Gmail Contextual Gadgerts? https://developers.google.com/gmail/contextual_gadgets#what_is_a_gmail_contextual_gadget https://developers.google.com/gmail/contextual_gadgets#what_... I'm looking to build a plugin that can automatically send a mail back under specific conditions and allows follow-ups, but I'm not sure what tech I should use.
- icebraining 11y agoIn my experience (I've built a gadget for our internal use, to create tickets on our software from emails), the gadgets are fairly limited, both in terms of the content they can access (only the first 1000 characters, and no attachments) and in terms of UI (you get a small bar below the email - no integration with the rest of the interface). Even for our simple use case, which is essentially a button that makes an HTTP request to a web service with the email fields, it felt limited. It also suffers from poor debugging tools. They made some changes that broke our gadget (I think it was the deactivation of OAuth 1.0) and there's no way of knowing why it isn't loading, it just doesn't.
- yid 11y agoIf anyone wants to go a different route, Gmail has a fairly complete REST API [1]. [1] https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/ https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/
- alooPotato 11y agoYup - this is great for getting at some of the backend data in gmail, the InboxSDK is designed to let you build apps inside the Gmail frontend experience.
- timjahn 11y agoNice! Was thinking about building a Gmail counterpart for Donald in the future, looks like this will simplify/speed up development for that.
- cherry_su 11y agoHow does this compare with Nylas (https://nylas.com https://nylas.com), who claims they're the "next generation email platform"?
- alooPotato 11y agoNylas is really cool. If I remember correctly they are building a base email application that can be extended with plugins (like the atom editor). This does require people to adopt their email client. The InboxSDK takes a different approach in that it lets you extend Gmails functionality and write apps for Gmail. End users don't have to switch their email client (assuming their using the gmail web client)
- andreineculau 11y agoWell done! I just hope that proper alternatives to customer support services take the chance to surface. It's insane to see how they replicate 3/4 of gmail/another-email-ui functionality just because they add 10% extra functionality to streamline communication with customers (e.g. multi-language canned responses, etc). Build on top, reuse, don't copy-paste!
- schmielson 11y agoCo-founder of DocSend here - we've been powering DocSend's integration into Gmail with the InboxSDK, and it's been a fantastic experience. So easy to use, and very robust - exactly what you look for in an API. This is a total game-changer. Very excited to see what the inbox will become thanks to the Streak team. Cheers! And of course you can check out the DocSend extension here to get insight into page-by-page engagement with your document attachments :) https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/docsend-extension-for-chr/nmkphfcebcpicnakipcmgapcckkbhppd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/docsend-extension-...
- nrao123 11y agoThis is pretty cool! What I am really dying/desperate for is a group chat feature within Gmail where the chat rooms are permanent. I thought it was the biggest opportunity for years. Slack built a billion $ plus business of group chat outside of gmail. I am sure there is a reasonable sized opportunity for group chat within Gmail!
- thyselius 11y agoDoes this mean I can have a SIGNATURE in Inbox now? If so, how? (I'm using Safari, so there hasn't been any way that I know of to use a signature, which is the one dealbreaker for me to use Inbox, which I love)
- bliti 11y agoSerious question: How would this handle changes in Gmail? Google is the platform owner and may change it without prior notice. My interest is in understanding how would someone using this sdk would be impacted.
- alooPotato 11y agoWe (streak) keep the SDK up to date. The JavaScript you put in your extension remotely loads the actual implementation of the SDK. If gmail changes, we change the implementation (fast) and your users get the change automatically. You the app developer dont need to do anything or even update your extension.
- bliti 11y agoAny blog post that explains this a but further? It should be an interesting read, given that I assume you track changes and update programatically (to a degree).
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoNeat idea but I don't get how it works with feature rollouts. If Gmail is updated which changes the DOM and breaks the API how does the SDK handle being updated when it's rarely a change that's rolled out instantly for all users (usually takes some time maybe even weeks). I mean you either have a TON of feature testing to figure it out or you let it break; neither of which seems very maintainable to me. What's going to happen with the rumored update? I've been hearing rumors for over a year now that gmail, calendar, contacts and even tasks are being majorly overhauled; is there any collaboration with Google to make sure when (or if) these rumors come true that it won't simply break everything day one? Trying not to be a nay sayer; this is a great idea if you want to quickly add something to Gmail without messing with the Gmail DOM yourself but it doesn't seem to be a good long term bet to me.
- ellisonf9 11y agoDear Gmail Team: Why haven't you acquired this team yet (Streak)?
- barraponto 11y agoI would love for such and SDK for Google Maps. It's ubiquitous and I'm always trying to catch up with API breakage. Is there something like that?