We’re excited to see developer interest in the upcoming Chrome Web Store, particularly around installable web apps. Many of you have also asked about how extensions and apps differ, and how apps can leverage extension behavior.

To answer these questions and more, we’ve published a new article to help you decide between building extensions and building apps. In the article, you’ll read about how apps and extensions vary from the user’s perspective and how they compare in their internal architecture and capabilities. We’ve also included a deep dive on the concept of packaged apps as a blend of app and extension behaviour.

We hope this article helps clarify the distinction between pure extensions, packaged apps, and hosted apps so that you can choose the approach that makes the most sense for your work and your users. To learn more about installable webs apps and ask questions to our team, check out our discussion group. We look forward to getting your feedback!

Posted by Michael Mahemoff, Developer Advocate

Linus Torvalds and Jeremy Allision were both in Sao Paulo, Brazil a few weeks ago for LinuxCon, where they were both presenters. Later in the week when they were waiting to go on a safari at the Sao Paulo Zoo, Jeremy seized the opportunity to go on a trip down memory lane when he asked Linus about the Sinclair QL they each owned while growing up. Because it was so hard to get software for it in Finland, Linus wrote his own assembler and editor (in addition to Pac-Man graphics libraries). They continue to reminisce about more archaic hardware like floppy drives, microdrives, 512 K RAM expansion packs and the Acorn Archimedes.

It’s a geek fest for fans of British computers from the ‘80s! Who knew that the Sinclair QL would play a role in the development of the modern free operating system?

Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog

Google Apps is designed to provide a secure and reliable platform for your data. Until today, Google Apps administrators had to sign requests for calls to Google Apps APIs using their username and password (this is called ClientLogin Authorization).

Yet sharing passwords across sites can pose security risks. Furthering our commitment to make the cloud more secure for our users, today we are pleased to announce support for OAuth authorization on Google Apps APIs.

There are several advantages to using OAuth instead of the username/password model:

• OAuth is more secure: OAuth tokens can be scoped and set to expire by a certain date, making them more secure than using the ClientLogin mechanism.
• OAuth is customizable: Using OAuth, you can create tokens that scripts may only use to access data of a particular scope when calling Google Apps APIs. For instance, a token set to call the Email Migration API would not be able to use your login credentials to access the Google Apps Provisioning API.
• OAuth is an open standard: OAuth is an open source standard, making it a familiar choice for developers to work with.

The Google Apps APIs that support the OAuth signing mechanism are:

1. Provisioning API
2. Email Migration API
3. Admin Settings API
4. Calendar Resource API
5. Email Settings API
6. Audit API

OAuth support for Google Apps APIs is another step towards making Google Apps the most secure, reliable cloud based computing environment for organizations. To learn more about OAuth support and other administrative capacities launched in Google Apps this quarter, join us for a live webinar on Wednesday, September 29th at 9am PT / 12pm EST / 5pm GMT.

Administrators for Google Apps Premier, Education, and Government Editions can use OAuth authorization for Google Apps APIs starting today.For more information about the OAuth standard, visit http://oauth.net.