I'm looking to create a chrome extension to modify the Gmail of users.
Something similar to the rapportive extension.
I already tried to develop a google gadget, but i want to set a right menu context (as rapportive), i also tried the raplets solution and it's not what i want.
I tried to find documentation with google, but i didn't found something to modify Gmail.
Can you help me to start.
Rapportive was able to add UI in GMail by manipulating Gmail's DOM.
The idea is that:
when it recognise that GMail is inside a email thread (see Gmailjs's gmail.observe method)
it then inserts its own UI by directly manipulating the DOM.
then load social data based on the details of the current thread
These libraries will help you in reading the current state of GMail (eg. which page is it currently on, all people involved in an email etc)
Gmailr: https://github.com/jamesyu/gmailr
Gmailjs: https://github.com/KartikTalwar/gmail.js
to manipulate the GMail's DOM, you can always use jQuery or leverage chrome's native methods in manipulating the DOM since you wont to worry about cross browser inconsistencies