Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gmail Launches Add-ons

blog.google

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 238 posts

Re: Gmail Launches Add-ons

#21

Post by harigov »

wubbapubba wrote: post #6

Gmail is consolidating their dominance with stuff like this. If things start replacing email communication, gmail will just provide it on top which moves us further and further from a standards compliant SMTP GUI that email was. I haven't found an email client that reliably renders most html, yet we have addons and soon maybe Android apps in your email.

I guess Microsoft is close behind and probably leading in the number of paying customers. However, a duopoly isn't that much better either. It's unfortunate that the spirit of the internet that resulted in many open technologies is slowly being circumvented by companies seeking to monopolize. Unlike old monopolies, where breaking apart is reasonably easy, these new monopolies are entrenched right from their technology stack.

Re: Gmail Launches Add-ons

#22

Post by zack12 »

I have been using unofficial addons for a while like Todoist and Trello and love the fact that they are making a step in the right direction. More integrations, more love.

On the other hand, I really hate their blog design. The reading space is less than half the screen. https://cl.ly/0h2z471o0v2W

Re: Gmail Launches Add-ons

#24

Post by edraferi »

wubbapubba wrote: post #6

Gmail is consolidating their dominance with stuff like this. If things start replacing email communication, gmail will just provide it on top which moves us further and further from a standards compliant SMTP GUI that email was. I haven't found an email client that reliably renders most html, yet we have addons and soon maybe Android apps in your email.

I don't think it's quite so gloomy. A lot of cool add-on functionality relies on semantic markup in the email itself [0]. These are open standards by necessity -- any email provider can add support for them. For example, here's the standard for flight reservations [1].

I'm not sure how widely adopted they are, but Microsoft supports at least event discovery [2].

[0] https://developers.google.com/gmail/markup/

[1] http://schema.org/FlightReservation

[2] https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Automatically-add-t...

edit: formatting

Re: Gmail Launches Add-ons

#25

Post by jypepin »

So, I started using inbox a while ago when it was announced and I love it. Really.

What's the state of development of it? Doesn't seems to be moving much and a lot of features from gmail are still missing, and I continue to see dev happening on gmail and not on inbox.

Should I be moving back to inbox?

Re: Gmail Launches Add-ons

#26

Post by pkamb »

What I've always wanted are widgets that show up in your inbox as if they're emails, but aren't actually emails.

So rather than your calendar sending you an email reminder, it inserts a calendar "app" item that's opened when you click the subject of the non-email.

Or a todo list that lives in your inbox, but directly opens a todo document rather links to a todo document. Would replace the never-sent draft I currently use for the same.

Re: Gmail Launches Add-ons

#27

Post by sushisource »

jypepin wrote: post #25

So, I started using inbox a while ago when it was announced and I love it. Really. What's the state of development of it? Doesn't seems to be moving much and a lot of features from gmail are still missing, and I continue to see dev happening on gmail and not on inbox. Should I be moving back to inbox?

Yeah, inbox seems vastly superior to me, with the exception that it runs like absolute shit on Firefox which I can only interpret as intentional, considering I find FF faster than Chrome for a lot of other stuff these days.

Re: Gmail Launches Add-ons

#28

Post by icebraining »

forgotmypw wrote: post #23

Sounds a lot like Gmail Labs, which was discontinued. I've learned to expect most Google products to be killed off, so I don't even bother starting to use them anymore.

Labs were experimental features developed by Google itself. These are stable features developed by third-parties. They both extend Gmail, but that's about it.

Re: Gmail Launches Add-ons

#29

Post by aNoob7000 »

Are there any concerns about privacy? I mean now you have applications that will use a platform that Google is known to scan for information.

I know everyone has heard this before, but I would like to see what people think. A couple of days ago, people were all up in arms about phone companies selling your website traffic. What makes Google better than god forbid AT&T or Verizon?

Re: Gmail Launches Add-ons

#30

Post by icebraining »

tyingq wrote: post #13

I wonder if this is just "contextual gadgets"[1] that have existed for paid gsuite/gmail for a while. If not, they should probably consolidate the two. [1] https://developers.google.com/gmail/gadgets_overview

In my experience, Gadgets have been languishing for a while. We developed one to integrate Gmail with our issues tracker (it created an issue from the email content), yet after we tried to deploy an update, now using the new control panel, it simply never showed up again.
Post reply on HN