Your name sounded very familiar, finally realized from where after reading the recent opendata email! Great job on this and the OpenDataUW API stuff. I am also admiring the PHP Scraper Class as I was planning on writing something similar.
Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail
51–60 of 63 posts
Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail
#52Your name sounded very familiar, finally realized from where after reading the recent opendata email! Great job on this and the OpenDataUW API stuff. I am also admiring the PHP Scraper Class as I was planning on writing something similar.
Thanks Rohit!
Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail
#53Unfortunately this type of hacking isn't really sustainable. Even small tweaks to the Gmail UI often change the DOM in very unpredictable ways. When they released the new compose feature, pretty much every single Gmail Chrome extension broke. We haven't really announced it yet, but I've been working on a new email platform with some friends to solve a lot of these issues. It's essentially Rails/Meteor for email featu…
Thanks for your feedback. I agree, which is why i decided to put it out there because I use the library in a chrome extension and if something breaks, I would be trying to get the extension fixed - patching gmail.js. Still better than finding random solutions from here and there or duplicating efforts. :-) I'd be interested in seeing what you guys are working so, so I'll ping you soon
Yeah, I'm certainly not meaning to belittle your efforts. I wrote something similar (based on jamesjyu's gmailr stuff) for my thesis last year. It's the best way to do it for relatively simple one-off projects.
The first big challenge is definitely just having a shared toolkit, but it's next to impossible to provide backwards-compatible APIs when the Gmail UI changes.
Oh... and IMAP. :-/
Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail
#54I'd love to use this but I can't figure out what's the action/event for when I open an email to read it. I'm sure it's there, I just can't see it ..
Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail
#55Been looking for something like this! Perfect. Thanks for the effort!
Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail
#56Unfortunately this type of hacking isn't really sustainable. Even small tweaks to the Gmail UI often change the DOM in very unpredictable ways. When they released the new compose feature, pretty much every single Gmail Chrome extension broke. We haven't really announced it yet, but I've been working on a new email platform with some friends to solve a lot of these issues. It's essentially Rails/Meteor for email featu…
I have encountered this across various other google services. Case in point: I was hacking together a simple Alfred (http://www.alfredapp.com/) extension, using AppleScript to allow creating & searching of google keep notes. It broke about 2 days afterwards and, in the absence of official (stable) endpoints from google themselves, I gave up on the idea.
Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail
#57It would be amazing if this were a service. Easier said than done, I know -- but, basically this but have it check a JSON file every few hours and gets the updated selectors. (For people who don't know, all GMail's classes and IDs are things like '.xb3', and they change often.) Having worked on Mozilla Add-ons for a long time, one of the biggest problems was by the time any G-Mail add-on was approved, it was already…
As I understand, from one of the early Gmail product managers, element class names are the most stable of all the 'fingerprints'. The Javascript data structures are quite stable, and the element IDs change pretty much every session. (Source: I'm the author of the ActiveInbox Gmail extension, and at various times have spoken to Gmail engineers directly). I agree a service would be a useful thing. A killer bit of value…
Maybe it could just be a JSON file with the xpath of all important elements?
Also maybe it doesn't really have to be a service. It could just be a file on github, where anyone could issue a pull request if gets broken broken. That way way you would essentially crowd source it.
Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure Google would like this?
Why would they not like this? You still need to open up gmail.com. This is pretty much like you scraping google search results.
Historically extensions for Gmail have often been problematic. A lot of people install them and then forget about them, and if something changes, they blame Gmail and there's errors that can't be reproduced. Plus there's the whole security issue of giving third party code access to your mails.
Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure Google would like this?
Google is aware that people are building tools on top of their UI. If they were against it, they could pretty easily thwart it (e.g. by randomizing their HTML/CSS, or by serve different versions to different users). The fact that they haven't taken time to do this is, I believe, evidence that they aren't hostile to these efforts. Also, I've personally been in contact with people on the Gmail team about this kind of s…
They want to see what works and becomes popular.
Re: Show HN: Gmail.js – JavaScript API for Gmail
#60Been looking for something like this! Perfect. Thanks for the effort!
Thanks!