Google+ APIs With Search

In the spirit of releasing early and often, Google released some of the new features that you requested.

Search for it

Last month Google launched search in Google+, and now it’s available in the API. You can search for public posts using the new activities.search method by sending the following HTTP request:

GET
https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/activities?query=cookie%20recipes&orderBy=best&key=[yourAPIKey]

This method searches across the body and comments of public posts. It returns the following JSON encoded output (excerpted for brevity):

{
 "kind": "plus#activityFeed",
 "title": "Plus Search for cookie recipes",
 "updated": "2011-09-30T16:57:34.479Z",
 "id": "tag:google.com,2010:buzz-search-feed:x4rIYTKpR7NZCL8Id8RHXQ",
 "items": [
  {
   "kind": "plus#activity",
   “id”: “123”,
   "title": "You have to try these out.",
   "object": {
    "objectType": "note",
    "content": "I’m baking halloween cookies!",
   },
   {
   "kind": "plus#activity",
   “id”: “456”,
   "title": "Cookies",
   "object": {
    "objectType": "note",
    "content": "Cookies and milk for dinner. Don’t judge me.",
   },
 ]
}

You can search for people by using the people.search method:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/people?query=vic%20gundotra&key=[yourAPIKey]

This searches across public profile information including fields such as name, bio, location, tag line, and description.

The rest of the conversation

Google +  first API release let you retrieve public posts. We’ve now added ways for you to see how people are publicly engaging with those posts — you can find out who reshared a post or who +1’d a post, and you can read the comments on a post.

The new method people.listByActivity supports retrieving resharers and +1’ers by sending the following HTTP requests:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/activities/{activityId}/people/resharers?key=[yourAPIKey]
GET https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/activities/{activityId}/people/plusoners?key=[yourAPIKey]

And comments can be retrieved by the new comments.list and comments.get methods:

GET https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/activities/{activityId}/comments?key=[yourAPIKey]
GET https://www.googleapis.com/plus/v1/comment/{commentId}?key=[yourAPIKey]

Google Environment: Integrated Mobile Apps

 

The Google Apps Marketplace is a storefront for Google Apps customers to discover, purchase, deploy and manage web applications which are integrated with Google Apps. These applications are typically used from desktops and laptops, but many vendors on the Apps Marketplace have also optimized the experience for their users who are on-the-go. There are several different strategies for enabling a mobile workforce, and each requires a different approach to authentication and authorization.

Lightweight: Synchronize Contacts, Calendars and Docs with Google Apps

Google has written applications and synchronization clients to help ensure that the core Google Apps data is available to users on their mobile devices, whether they’re on their mobile phones or tablets. By storing contacts, dates and documents from your application in Google Apps using the application APIs, you can leverage these features to provide a mobile view for your users.

Since you’re only accessing the application APIs on your web application’s server, and the user has already linked up their mobile device to their Google account, there are no special techniques for authentication and authorization when using this lightweight approach.

Standards-based: Build a mobile-optimized web application

With the latest advances in HTML5 web technologies such as offline and local storage, it’s possible to build mobile interfaces for business apps which are full-featured and accessible to users on many devices. The primary goal in building the mobile web application is to optimize the user experience for different input devices, form factors and limitations in network availability and bandwidth.

Because the application is in a web browser, most of the changes to implement are in the frontend– HTML, JavaScript and CSS. User authentication and data authorization continue to use the same OpenID and OAuth technologies as are used for the desktop/laptop version of the application.

Device-custom: Build native companion apps for mobile devices

Does your application need access to hardware-specific APIs which are not available in a web browser, or do you feel a great user experience can only be achieved using native code? Several Apps Marketplace vendors have built native applications for popular mobile platforms like Android and iOS. Although it takes considerably more effort to build multiple native applications to cover the major platforms, these vendors can also take advantage of the additional distribution channels offered by mobile stores.

Authentication and authorization are often challenging for developers building native mobile applications because they cannot simply ask users for a password if their app supports single-sign on to Google with OpenID. We recently published an article describing a technique using an embedded webview for accomplishing OpenID authentication in mobile apps. This article includes references to sample code for Android and iOS.

Many Project Management applications, like Manymoon, store important dates on Google Calendar. These dates are then available on mobile devices.

GQueues has a HTML5 mobile app. Their founder has written about why they used this technique.

Native applications, such as the OpenID Sample Store displayed, can use an embedded webview to authenticate users.

GoogleCodeNews

Google Summer of Code & OpenIntents


This year was the first year OpenIntents participated in the Google Summer of Code. We are an open source organization which creates software for Android mobile phones and tablets, with special emphasis on interoperability with other software components.

As an organization we’ve found involvement in the Google Summer of Code extremely rewarding. The students have been able to improve their skills and gain practical experience in the stages of a software project, our organization has benefited from the interest generated from the students’ work, and the wider community will continue to benefit from the code the students have delivered.

We particularly enjoyed the international aspect of the program. All students, mentors, and co-mentors lived in different countries which did not prevent us from having a great time discussing the projects through Skype and live chat sessions. We received a great number of excellent proposals, from which two very different projects were chosen for the program.

Elena Burceanu’s project aimed to enhance the Sensor Simulator. During the first weeks, the GUI was polished, both in appearance and through clever code restructuring. After enhancing the GUI the number of supported sensors was increased and now includes Android sensors for gyroscope and general rotation vector. Finally, a scenario simulator was added, which creates sensor output from a set of initial states and the ability to change the time intervals between them. The sensor’s values are smoothly interpolated between the key frames. The final product was released as version 2.0. The source code and documentation for Elena’s project are now available to view.

Andras Berke’s project consists of a new application called Historify which displays the user’s activities with others over a variety of communication methods (Voice, SMS, Facebook, etc.), and provides a method for third party applications to supply other activity events showing the interoperability of Android applications. During the summer Andras went through the whole application design process from the UI wireframes to a first beta release including documentation along the way. In addition, he provided demo applications to show how third party developers can interact with Historify. You can now view the source code and documentation from Andras’ summer project.