A few days ago I was blown away but what a (still) little-known startup called MixMax is doing with email — nothing short of revolutionizing it! If you haven’t see it yet, do check it out, especially if you often find yourself scheduling meetings or lunches over email, asking for feedback, conducting polls or sharing rich media with others.

MixMax enhances, enriches, extends (EEE!) the standard Gmail functionality with a lot of goodies, accessible from both the GUI as well as via the "slash" commands while composing an email.

Slash commands have been used for a very long time, to send "commands", like in age-old IRC, as well as the much more recent app Slack, or even, any multi-player online video games.

So imagine my joy, when I realized that with a simple /cal I can now insert a few available time slot options in my email, and request the recipient to choose one. Once they do, the event is inserted into my calendar right away. This is magic!

I haven’t gone through an exhaustive list of the features MixMax offers at this time, but a few stand out and are certainly going to be in my daily use.

Right now MixMax connects to one gmail account, so if you are using multiple, you’ll need to setup and connect two separate MixMax accounts. Not a huge deal, but maybe it would been nicer to have a single "umbrella" account there, that can see all of your email accounts.

Of course, one of the first things I did was to see if the tool is extensible, and to my delight, it sure was! So, with a bit of free time on my hands, and a long standing desire to get a bit more Node.JS under my belt, I embarked on an adventure of building a simple link resolver for Wanelo — the fantastic product discovery site, and a social network where I worked until pretty recently.

I will admit that I am a big sucker for JetBrains series of IDEs. Having learned one (the Java IDE JetBrains IDEA a very long time ago, I feel that I pretty much know them all now, because of how many similarities are between each IDE. JetBrains did a fantastic job at abstracting out functionality of an IDE away from a specific language or a framework, and thus building us a series of best of breed IDEs on the market.

I love them so much that I recently purchased a two-year long All Products Pack that gives me all of their IDEs! It’s actually a pretty damn amazing deal. And no, I do not receive commissions from JetBrains, I am simply a very enthusiastic user.

To cut the long story pretty damn short, I built a small project to resolve Wanelo product URLs into a small widget that looks like this:

Along the way I had to figure out how to

I will add all these details in a follow-up blog post, but for the time being, please checkout the GitHub Repo — note that it contains instructions, should you choose to install this resolver for yourself.

Thanks for reading!