If anyone wants to go a different route, Gmail has a fairly complete REST API [1].
Show HN: InboxSDK by Streak (YC S11) – Build Apps inside Gmail
31–40 of 63 posts
Re: Show HN: InboxSDK by Streak (YC S11) – Build Apps inside Gmail
#32Founder 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.
Wow, this is amazing! Thank you for doing this! I honestly believe this is could be the most impactful innovation to come to the email space in years. InboxSDK was obviously a ton of work. What is your business model for it?
Well the great part about us working on the InboxSDK is that we need it ourselves for Streak. We were already doing a lot of the work and we wanted to more cleanly separate our business logic from our Gmail wrangling. As we add support to the SDK for Google's Inbox client, Streak and other apps built on the SDK will run inside of Google's Inbox for free and automatically.
As for business model, we aren't really thinking about that too much, we just knew how much pain ppl went through making gmail apps and just knew that the SDK needed to exist. We don't plan on charging for it.
We've talked a lot about doing an appstore inside gmail. The idea being that apps could opt in to be in the appstore. If you opt-in then your app automatically adds the appstore to your users gmail experience. That would help drive traffic to apps. Once a user installs any one of the apps, they have access to all the other apps in the appstore.
Re: Show HN: InboxSDK by Streak (YC S11) – Build Apps inside Gmail
#33If anyone wants to go a different route, Gmail has a fairly complete REST API [1]. [1] https://developers.google.com/gmail/api/
Yup - 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.
Re: Show HN: InboxSDK by Streak (YC S11) – Build Apps inside Gmail
#34You 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 Then I see the github page: https://github.com/InboxSDK/ There is no InboxSDK project but, just two example chrome plugins using the inboxSDK. All the trappings and mechanics of ope…
some more info on this here https://www.inboxsdk.com/terms
Re: Show HN: InboxSDK by Streak (YC S11) – Build Apps inside Gmail
#35Nice! Was thinking about building a Gmail counterpart for Donald in the future, looks like this will simplify/speed up development for that.
Re: Show HN: InboxSDK by Streak (YC S11) – Build Apps inside Gmail
#36Any plans to support exchange in future?
Sorry 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
Some 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/
Re: Show HN: InboxSDK by Streak (YC S11) – Build Apps inside Gmail
#37How does this compare with Nylas (https://nylas.com), who claims they're the "next generation email platform"?
Re: Show HN: InboxSDK by Streak (YC S11) – Build Apps inside Gmail
#38You 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 Then I see the github page: https://github.com/InboxSDK/ There is no InboxSDK project but, just two example chrome plugins using the inboxSDK. All the trappings and mechanics of ope…
Thanks 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.
Re: Show HN: InboxSDK by Streak (YC S11) – Build Apps inside Gmail
#39How does this compare with Nylas ( https://nylas.com ), who claims they're the "next generation email platform"?
Nylas 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)
Re: Show HN: InboxSDK by Streak (YC S11) – Build Apps inside Gmail
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, 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…
A 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 parti…
Thanks for the safari bug. fixing...