Show HN: InboxSDK by Streak (YC S11) – Build Apps inside Gmail

I 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?

Very cool wrappers, I've used Streak off and on for a while and definitely appreciate how well it integrates with gmail.

Do you have any notion of how fragile things are when dom-hacking? Do you have to constantly keep up with google's updates or are things fairly stable? i.e. how often will I need to update and/or patch an extension to maintain support (in your experience so far)?

Great job and initiative! Gmelius Founder here. A few questions:

i) Are you planning to make the whole implementation Open Source?

ii) Say I wish to adopt and use your SDK in my current Gmail/Inbox extensions (>100K daily users), may I expect the implementation of a fixed upper limit on the number of transmissions in the coming months (which could endanger the reliability of my service for my users)?

iii) While the SDK currently only focuses on the UI, are you planning to add more "complex" interactions, such as Gmail filters/Gmail preferences ? If yes, feel free to get in touch. I will be happy to help.

Congrats, again.

We have systems in place to make sure we catch any changes to the DOM. We usually see these changes before 99% of gmail users and can make any necessary changes within minutes usually.

In the last 6 months we've seen 0 breaking changes, 1 in the 6 months before that (it was fixed before the change even reached users), and 2 in the prior 12 months (where our fix reached product in sub 10 minutes).

Cofounder 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.