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Comment by hackerews | Hacker News Reader

This is for building add-ons for GitHub, Asana, Trello, Airtable, Pivotal Tracker, and other productivity apps. And they don't break because they cleanly use that app's API.

The primary features are meant to make API development much better:

- Sign in with X instead of setting up OAuth flows or auth.

- Webhooks are built in, so you don't need a server to catch.

- API docs autocomplete. No need to dig through them.

- It's Serverless. Deploy your add-on on save.

It's inspired by Google Apps Script, the platform that powers all Google Docs add-ons. Hence less like Greasemonkey in that it uses real APIs under the hood, and less like Zapier in that it's for building add-ons instead of event pipelines.

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>less like Zapier in that it's for building add-ons instead of event pipelines

Hmm. I'd gotten that impression because of these excerpts from your site:

"When someone stars your GitHub repo, automatically send them a thank you email"

"Blockspring Scripts makes it easy to sync data, build alerts, reports, integrations, and 'if x then y' workflows for the products you use every day"

Thanks, good point. It's more for use-cases like this:

- Build a Mail Merge add-on for Airtable in 2 Minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahG935eGnb4

- Build a Sheets Importer/Exporter for Trello in 60 Seconds: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqcD6Qrc3Ck

UPDATE: changed a bit of content on page to reflect this.

Seems like you rely on the chrome extension to initiate the script? I.e. for the mail merge from airtable, you figure out which page the users is on to know which table to merge from correct?

If so, might I suggest inboxsdk.com for help with your extension dealing with Gmail.

Big fan of Streak! Thanks for the suggestion.

You're right -- since these apps don't (yet) embed our SDK in to their site, we need to get the current state (eg current page, selected table, etc) from the Chrome Extension. But our goal is to provide entire entire extensibility platform in an embeddable JS snippet, so hopefully that won't be the case long.

Unfortuantely it might be difficult to convince Google to include your script inside their apps :)

Other than our InboxSDK, you could also look into building a gmail addon and having your users install that, but it would be another install in addition to your chrome extension.

Isn't Gmail enabling Google Apps Script-based add-ons soon (or already)?

Yes exactly what I was referencing. But users install them independently if your chrome extension.

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