LOUIS GRAY: Welcome back to Google Developers Live at I/O
from Moscone here at Google I/O 2013.
I'm Louis Gray from the Google Developers Live, and my guest
right now is Nicolas Garnier.
NICOLAS GARNIER: Hi, Louis.
LOUIS GRAY: On the Drive team.
He comes to us from Zurich, Switzerland.
So that's quite the trip.
We definitely appreciate your coming by.
And today we're here to talk about the first
year of Google Drive.
It's hard to imagine it's only been one year.
But it came out last year.
Last time we were here, we were talking about docs, and
spreadsheets, and each piece in its own little slot.
So maybe you can give us a little understanding of what's
happened in the last 12 months.
How has Drive evolved?
NICOLAS GARNIER: Well, 12 months ago, basically, we
launched Google Drive, right?
And people were really anticipating this launch.
It's really what people expected, right?
It's really a service for people to back up all of the
files that they have on their desktop and open them online.
And basically allowed them to share these files with their
friends, for example, or their colleagues.
But really, lots of the effort that we have put in, and lots
of, I would say, the groundbreaking features that
we've been working on are really related to the SDK of
Google Drive.
So the SDK, that's basically the API and a bunch of other
features that I'm going to tell you
about in this session.
LOUIS GRAY: And that really sets it up for developers who
want to develop against the Drive API.
NICOLAS GARNIER: It's really for apps to really build on
top of Google Drive and really use Google Drive as basically
the file system for the web platform, right?
You can find nowadays really cool, really powerful apps
online, for example, photo editors, I don't know, even
faxing applications or diagram editors.
All of that.
So even Google Docs, right, all of these apps that went
online that are great editors.
We hope for them to actually use Google Drive, really, as
the central place to read files and basically save files
to so that users have this central place to really hold,
and manage, and organize all of their files.
Not only the files that they have on the desktop, but
really use that for really the web platform, as I said.
All of the apps that are out there that need to save files,
that need to read files, basically.
LOUIS GRAY: And you talked about, you look at a
differentiation between backup, which is essentially a
passive environment where you just send files from one place
and put them in another to retrieve later, to more of an
active, interactive piece with applications touching those
files, sharing with other people.
One thing that I've enjoyed is you essentially have, whether
it be Chrome OS or any other application, if you log into
your account on Google, your Drive documents are
everywhere, wherever you fall.
And it makes it really feel like any computer in the world
is my computer.
It's no longer that my files are on my
desktop living somewhere.
Do you feel like that's really changed the way
users perceive it?
NICOLAS GARNIER: Yeah.
I think that's really one of the big reasons why people are
really moving away from the desktop and doing more and
more things online, basically, alongside with all of the cool
apps that are available.
But to actually make these web apps better and make them
actually want to use Google Drive as an SDK, we've been
launching a bunch of features [INAUDIBLE] this year.
I can just mention a few ones really quickly.
There's now a way for people who have files on Google Drive
to publish their files as a website, basically.
That's one of the real interesting features.
We launched a real time API allowing apps to build
real-time collaboration feature, web apps that are
using Google Drive.
Real-time collaboration feature that would be similar
to Google Docs, for instance.
We've seen some really, really cool apps that
are using that future.
What else?
LOUIS GRAY: One of the good things about being at Google
Developers Live and getting to see the Google Drive team
present is I've seen a lot of these real-time interactive
features with the Realtime API.
I've seen a number of the developers out there who have
tapped into it for the first time.
And we've been able to see a lot of the tips, be it Claudio
or Stephen and the members of your team talking about how to
drive your first Drive apps, be it in Java or C++, or
JavaScript.
It really seems like the Drive APIs are exceptionally
flexible for any type of code that comes in there.
NICOLAS GARNIER: Yeah, definitely.
Actually, most of our APIs at Google have this really wide
set of client libraries.
We're really trying to make it easy for everyone to
integrate with us.
I think we have client libraries in
eight or nine languages.
You know, iOS, Java, Python, PHP, et cetera, JavaScript.
And for JavaScript developers, and for web apps in general,
we are really trying to make it even easier.
We launched, for example, a bunch of
widgets, widgets that--
basically really common UI components, features of Drive
that we don't want developers out there to have to rebuild
everything again.
So we provide a bunch of widgets to them.
Like for example the picker, which is this little file
explorer they can embed in their website.
So they don't have to build that, right?
They can just trigger that widget.
It's just a few lines of JavaScript.
And people can go ahead and select a file in their drive.
It's like this little UI popping up.
It's pretty nice.
We have the same for sharing a file, right?
So we'll allow developers to actually embed that sharing
widget, the same one we use in Google Docs, or Google
Spreadsheet, or Google Drive, to embed that UI directly into
their website.
So they don't have to rebuild that feature again.
LOUIS GRAY: In what fashion would somebody use Google
Drive as the back end for their website?
I've seen the feature launched, and it's really
interesting to understand, what kind of actual
deployments have you seen so far?
NICOLAS GARNIER: So I think the best suited apps for this
currently are productivity apps.
That's really the type of application.
Online productivity apps.
That's really the type of application that can really
use the most of our features that are out there.
For example, I forgot to mention that we have this
really, really great feature that was available at the
launch of the API a year ago.
It's the ability for application to integrate
directly with the user interface of Google Drive.
So application can basically register--
just like they would on your local desktop computer, they
register to open certain [INAUDIBLE] types.
They tell us, hey, I can open image.
I'm an image editor, so I support opening JPG and PNG
images, and stuff like that.
So when people actually installed that web apps, or
connected, we call that, that web apps to Drive, then from
within Drive they can, for example, right-click on an
image or directly open an image with that image editor.
For example, I can cite a few ones,
Pixeler, Editor, or PicMonkey.
Those are the few cool image editors that you can find
online that have a very, very deep integration with the
Google Drive SDK, basically, the
Google Driver user interface.
LOUIS GRAY: You mentioned Pixeler.
They were actually one of the first developer partners that
I asked Ali to take a look at.
As somebody who uses Chrome OS every day, I want to have the
ability to get into image editing, get really deep into
it, do the cropping and all those things that you would do
typically with a native desktop application.
It's been great to see the integration with Drive there,
where you can take content that is stored in Drive and
pass it right through a system like that.
Now, we have only a couple minutes.
I definitely wanted to say thank you very much for coming
through, and talking with us about Drive, and giving us an
update on the 12 months of
advancements that have happened.
NICOLAS GARNIER: Thanks for hosting me.
LOUIS GRAY: Absolutely.
I appreciate you coming on GDL at I/O. For those of you on
the live stream, we're going to cut over to the sessions
momentarily.
And when we come back to GDL at I/O I'll be joined with the
team working on games, which were all
announced this morning.
Should have incredible demos coming up.
NICOLAS GARNIER: Thank you.