Hey, Product Hunt! I’m @SalmanSQ, the PM for App Unfurls. AMA!
App unfurls allow you to build custom previews for any link people share in Slack. You can rely on notifications from our events API to know when particular links get shared, and then add formatted message attachments to the links you care about.
You can also add buttons to let people take direct action, enabling “micro-workflows” for your app’s users or just for your team. Last but not least, app unfurls allow you to even preview authenticated content directly in Slack!
For instance, take an example like Periscope Data: using app unfurls, their app is able to bring the analytics dashboard right into Slack alongside a team’s other work. Check it out: https://slack.com/apps/A4C6CSAFM...
Want to build your own unfurls? @Anildash and his team at Glitch – a new collaborative coding community – have built a Slack app you can “remix” into a custom link preview for any domain. https://slack.com/apps/A4BLN1ZDW...
@salmansq We've been so impressed by the thought that the Slack team put into App Unfurls — links are such a fundamentally valuable building block for the web and they've been totally neglected by most platforms. I think there's going to be a ton of innovation around unfurls now that you've put this out in the world.
And yep, we've gotta mention how easy it is to add App Unfurl support to your own app; we've just loved getting to explore the new features. You can read up on how Glitch has built on unfurls here: https://medium.com/glitch/let-th...
@salmansq@anildash This is an exciting new development. You folks have been cranking on the Slack platform. As the developer of a bot on Slack, it's been great to see.
@salmansq Looks great, nice work! Any plans to support "dynamic" attachments that allow app developers to insert attachments that can display web/js embeds (in an iframe?) Have some interesting ideas for that at Chatlio. Thanks again for this update, looks great!
@jeberly
Hey John! We don't currently have iFrames on the roadmap, but we’re very interested in making the attachments more dynamic and interactive. I would absolutely love to hear your use cases for this so we can continue to work to support them better! In the meantime, you can read more about what we have coming on our public platform roadmap! https://trello.com/b/ZnTQyumQ/sl...
Hey there Slack team! So does this mean other video providers will be able to unfurl their own media now using the "unfurl_media" messaging? Would we be able to play Loom videos (https://www.useloom.com) in Slack? Great stuff either way!
@vhmth
Hey Vinay! Thank you so much for the question!
For this first release, "unfurl_media" will not work for App Unfurls, but it will continue to work as expected with our existing classic unfurl capabilities. You can read more about the difference here: https://api.slack.com/docs/messa...
App Unfurls have all of the capabilities of message attachments - including but not limited to: custom colors, titles, images, text, and most exciting, interactivity! You can read all about them here: https://api.slack.com/docs/messa...
@salmansq just to be clear though, this means that there is still no way to have inline media plays right? I'm 100% sympathetic as to why this may be the case - just looking for a straightforward answer because I can't find it in the documentation.
As a person who recommended this back in 2015, I'M SUPER EXCITED. Thank you Slack. I think this feature is going to be YUGE. Here is my product request from 2015 https://twitter.com/kurtybot/sta...
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