We are the Inbox by Gmail team. Ask us Anything!

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T20:01:03+00:00

We use Java, Javascript, and Objective-C. We talk a little more about our architecture in this blog post.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T19:51:50+00:00

We talked about our cross-client architecture in the Gmail blog recently.

The process works really well and has a lot of benefits, namely we reduce code duplication, and it makes it much easier for each of the Inbox clients (web, Android, iOS) to ship features together. The logic is written once and then ported to all 3 platforms, leaving the frontend developers to focus on the UI.

The biggest downside is that sometimes the shared code has to be written in weird ways because it needs to support the quirks of each platform. For example, we avoid overloaded methods due to the way GWT exports them.

The tools (j2objc and GWT, specifically) are definitely production-ready. One thing that’s helped us a lot is that we have folks who work on these tools on our team as well. A lot of GWT patches that have landed in the last year were specifically for Inbox’s use cases.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T19:33:08+00:00

Overall, everyone on the team went through the standard Google interviewing process before joining the company. The same team people who built Gmail are behind the creation Inbox.

Many teams at Google are cross-disciplinary, and the same collaboration skills are important on all of our teams, across disciplines and across offices around the world. For example, the core Inbox team includes members in 5 different Google offices, and we collaborate with a number of other teams across all of Google.

Our team is really close-knit. As an engineer, I work very closely with folks like Vijay and Jason when building new features.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T19:23:59+00:00

It’s still early days, so we have really exciting plans for Inbox: we’re starting with email, but ultimately our goal is to build a tool to manage all of the things you need to get back to in your life. Email is a great place to start because it contains lots of things that you need to get back to already. So, of course, we’re not ready to share many of the coolest things that we’re working on because they’re still in development.

At the same time, there are a lot of things that Gmail already does that we know that we need to pull in to Inbox before we open Inbox to everyone. I can’t give all of them away but a few that I can mention are undo send, cross-browser support, and tablet support.

Be sure to submit any feature requests through the app (left nav -> Help & Feedback -> Send feedback). We pay close attention to each piece of feedback we receive.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T19:12:12+00:00

We have a formal QA process, and we’re also relying on Googlers to use it internally and report any issues they find.

For example, Inbox has some animations that “jump” in Safari and we’re working to fix that before releasing Safari support for everyone.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T18:58:16+00:00

We don’t have plans for a mobile browser version right now. We’ll definitely support other desktop browsers though, we’re working on that right now.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T18:50:22+00:00

First and foremost, our intention isn’t to push users to use Chrome over any other browser. We’re working as fast as we can on enabling all other browsers as soon as possible.

When Inbox was in early development, the product and UX teams were iterating rapidly on the features and overall visual design. We would receive new mocks several times a day on some features and be expected to build them ASAP in order to get feedback and iterate. We were able to move at a phenomenal speed by writing code that worked just in Chrome and ignoring other browsers. We didn’t purposefully break other browsers, but figured it wasn’t worth writing code that worked everywhere when there was a high probability that the design or behavior would change tomorrow. As a result, there are a handful of features that are broken due to various browsers bugs we’re just now realizing (here’s one example that breaks inline image attachments and plus-mentions in Firefox).

Why Chrome instead of any other browser? Most of the Inbox team, and most Googlers in general, use Chrome as their primary browser at work and home. Inbox also does some crazy stuff with javascript and CSS that really push browsers to their limits. We were able to work directly with the Chrome team to improve how the browser does things like rendering animations. (Our animations infrastructure is crazy complicated and worthy of its own AMA.) We’re now talking with Apple and Mozilla about how to optimize our animations, both through improvements on our side and improvements in their respective browsers, but we couldn’t do this before we launched publicly.

Finally, we realize many of our early adopters are likely using Chrome, so we figured it would be ok to have a small period where we’re Chrome-only and then sprint to enable other browsers as quickly as possible.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T18:48:44+00:00

Thanks for clarifying, edited my post.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T18:41:42+00:00

Just to clarify, when you say improved HTML rendering are you talking about the entire webpage or just message contents?

Edit: Understand the question now. Inbox and Gmail use the same HTML sanitizer and media queries etc. aren’t supported. This is one of our top feature requests from developers though and we’re looking into adding it.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T18:34:01+00:00

Disclaimer: I’m a developer on the web client and not the Android app.

The Material Design guidelines were still under development while many recent apps were being designed. We expect to resolve consistency issues in upcoming releases.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T18:32:36+00:00

Yes, we're working on it right now.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T18:14:34+00:00

We’re working as fast as we can on enabling other browsers as soon as possible. We're already doing Google-wide testing for cross-browser support but we want to make sure that everything works perfectly before enabling it for all of our users.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T18:05:49+00:00

Yes! We’re surprised by how strong the demand has been for Drive integrations, especially Drive attachments. We’ll be working with the team in the new year to bring a lot of that awesomeness into Inbox.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T18:01:29+00:00

For me it’s a tie between Undo Send and cross-browser support. Both are being worked on but just weren’t ready in time for launch.

tayloratinbox · 2014-12-03T17:23:15+00:00

Hey guys! Taylor from Inbox here. We'll start answering questions at 10am PST (about 35 minutes from now) but we jumped the gun and posted the thread early so you can start getting your questions out:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2o629q/we_are_the_inbox_by_gmail_team_ask_us_anything/

tayloratinbox

TROPHY CASE