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

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

#7
post #4

I'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.

It'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.

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

#8

Founder 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.

What prevents Google closing the door on this?

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

#10
We 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 :)

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