CLAUDIO CHERUBINO: Hi everyone.
Welcome back to Google Developers Live.
My name is Claudio and I am one of the engineers in the
Google Drive Developer Relations Team.
Today with me I have two special guests, Austin and
Sebastian from Cooliris.
Austin is the co-founder and CTO of Cooliris.
And Sebastian works on Business
Development, is that right?
SEBASTIAN MUEHL: Exactly.
CLAUDIO CHERUBINO: Today they're going to show us their
app, Cooliris, which is, I would say, visually stunning.
It's an amazing way to browse your photos and do a lot of
other things.
And I am pretty sure they can explain it and show it much
better than I could do.
Austin, do you want to show us what Cooliris
does and what it is?
AUSTIN SHOEMAKER: I'd love to.
So Cooliris is an app for mobile devices and the web,
which allows you to organize and view all your media in a
unified experience, which allows you to first access the
media on your device.
So here I'm accessing all of the photos that are
stored on my tablet.
All visible in this user interface we've created that
we call the Wall.
So the Wall actually allows me to see everything and zoom
into it and see the high resolution content without the
need to leave the grid of photos that I'm in.
So that makes it much easier for me to just come and zoom
in and see one photo without having to keep pressing the
back button in the top left.
So I can browse content from my camera roll.
And I can also link all of the web services that I'm using.
So for example, we support your device, Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter, Picasa, Google+, Google Drive, Flickr.
And we just introduced support for Renren
in China and SmugMug.
You can also search Google Images to find images.
And one of the big features that you can take advantage of
in Cooliris is sharing any media that you can browse with
private groups.
So that enables you to start a conversation around anything
that you see.
And more than that, integrating Google Drive has
enabled us to let you save content from anywhere into
your Drive, which provides a really great bridge between
your mobile device and your computer.
So let me jump into Google Drive and show you what that
looks like.
So all I do is tap on that stack of photos.
And I'm already looking at all of the media in my Drive.
So when we looked at, how do we want to integrate Drive,
we're a very media-centric experience, and so what we've
done is use the Google Drive API to show you your photos
that are stored in Drive in reverse chronological order.
So these are the latest photos that have
been added to my Drive.
And as I scroll, we actually allow you to scroll through
all of the media that's stored in Drive.
And if I select a photo, it actually will load the high
resolution version of this photo.
But that's where it starts to become really cool that we're
able to take advantage of the Drive API.
So these images might be very large JPEGs, or even more
large files like RAW.
Since Google Drive indexes thumbnails, we're actually
able to request not only a small thumbnail of the photo,
which allows us to go through the grid very quickly, but we
can also load the exact high resolution representation
that's needed to display it on your device.
So instead of loading a three or four megabyte JPEG, we can
actually load exactly 300 kilobytes, which is enough to
show it on your--
And one of the really cool things that we're able to do
is keep this up-to-date.
So the APIs that we're using to populate the user interface
are the Drive files API, which we use to pull in the files
sorted by a date modified.
And once we've loaded the initial pages of files from
the files.get API, we then, instead of refreshing that,
will pull the changes feed, which gives us an ordered set
of changes to files that are in your Drive.
And by using files.get to paginate out as you scroll
backward, and also using changes list in order to get
the updates that have occurred to what we've loaded, that
makes it very efficient for us to show you a updated view of
content from your Drive without pulling
everything up front.
CLAUDIO CHERUBINO: So you're using a number tricks here to
have this very fast browsing experience.
So all already to the Drive API.
First, you're downloading the whole set the very first time,
but then using the changes feed to only get changes.
And--
[TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES]
AUSTIN SHOEMAKER: --in that conversation.
CLAUDIO CHERUBINO: That's very nice.
Thank you.
So I think my first question when I saw that is, I said,
this is beautiful, and unfortunately, I
do not have an iPad.
But I work at Google and I have some Android devices.
Any plans to have Cooliris on Android?
AUSTIN SHOEMAKER: So it's very exciting that we can say we're
actively building our Android application.
So the next major release of Cooliris is 3.0, and that will
be fully supported on iOS and Android.
And we think this is really important because people who
are using this app to communicate and share with
each other want everyone to be able to
interact with each other.
So we don't really have a complete communication product
until everybody can actively engage.
And we're very excited about the latest platform features
in Android and plan to take full advantage of them when we
release our product.
CLAUDIO CHERUBINO: So let's say I have Android device and
you have an iPad, and we both use Cooliris, can we do
whatever you just did with conversation and share
everything?
Doesn't matter what device I use, right?
AUSTIN SHOEMAKER: Exactly, so same experience across devices
and the web.
CLAUDIO CHERUBINO: Cool.
That's awesome.
Can I ask you how many users you have?
SEBASTIAN MUEHL: Yeah, right now, we
see 2.3 million installs.
So we just launched in July 2012.
And I think this is a very good head start.
We also see 350 million photos viewed, which is an amazing
number, I think.
CLAUDIO CHERUBINO: Nice, good job guys.
So you said what's coming next, that's very good.
You also mentioned some of the features we are working on,
like push notifications.
At Google we are working on adding these kind of
notifications to the Google Drive API, which is also going
to help you.
Can you talk a bit more about your experience with the
Google Drive API?
I mean, you're using a lot of cool things,
like advanced features.
Was there anything you didn't find as good?
AUSTIN SHOEMAKER: Using Google Drive?
CLAUDIO CHERUBINO: Maybe you couldn't find anything bad,
but maybe you did.
AUSTIN SHOEMAKER: Oh, so when we first integrated with the
version two API, which was the first time we could really
build our product.
In the version one API, you were only able to store and
get files created by the application.
And in the version two API we're able to request access
to all the files that are on Drive, which is what we were
able to build the Wall with.
There's no image centric metadata.
And that's one of the things that the Drive--
other image metadata, which we're able to display in the
little metadata bar at the bottom.
And there's no way that we could actually display that to
you without API assistance because we'd
have to load the files.
So the beautiful thing here is that Drive API can stream us
the content that we need.
First, the metadata, and then the low resolution thumbnail,
and then, on demand, the high resolution content.
It was initially a limitation, and then it was quickly
addressed in the API.
CLAUDIO CHERUBINO: You mentioned the image metadata.
When we released the first version API we got a lot of
requests about adding more and more metadata to the
image and we did.
We added some of the common Exif fields.
So what fields do you actually surface?
I see you use file name, and the file size,
and width and height.
Do you also use other fields, like location or what camera
took that photo, things like that?
Are those needed?
AUSTIN SHOEMAKER: Yeah, so right now, we don't show
extended Exif metadata, like camera make, model, et cetera.
We'll probably add that in the future.
One of the ones we do use today is location,
which is very cool.
So if your photo has geographic coordinates, then
we get that information from the Drive API and then we
reverse geocode that into a named location, which we
display in the metadata bar when you select the photo.
So that's really great because then you can get more context
for your media.
Instead of just seeing the photo, you can see when and
where it was taken.
One feature that Drive has always had--
which is really cool and that makes us look even more cool,
although it's purely the API doing this, I'd
love to show you--
content based search.
So all of the photos that you add to Drive are instantly
indexed by Drive to extract landmarks, objects, and other
recognizable searchable terms.
So I've put a whole bunch of photos in here and I want to
go look for some photos of the Eiffel Tower
that I remember taking.
So all I have to do is actually search--
you can't probably--
--the next feature requests.
I would absolutely love to build on that.
CLAUDIO CHERUBINO: Yeah, I mean, this is another common
feature request we got.
You're not the only ones asking for this.
We think that the Google Goggles integration-- which is
what you just showed-- is one of the very cool features of
Google Drive.
So anyone can just go to Drive, even without the API,
go to their Drive account on the web, search for things, as
you just did looking for Germany, and see things that
are related to that.
Because we recognize the image and that's super cool.
I think we are probably the only ones having that, which
is amazing.
And we're still debating how to expose that information
through the API.
We will definitely talk more about that.
Yeah, that's a great request and it's a common one.
So good job with that.
And we will probably do something.
OK, cool.
Yeah, I think that's it with Cooliris.
That was an awesome description of the
application, and how this actually works, and all the
APIs it uses, and all the tricks these guys have used to
make things fast and beautiful.
And my takeaway is that I'm really looking forward for the
Android version.
You don't want to say anything about dates, right?
AUSTIN SHOEMAKER: Not yet, but we will
definitely keep you posted.
CLAUDIO CHERUBINO: OK, cool.
With that, I would say thank you guys again.
Thank you for joining me.
And I will see all of you next time we go live, that is next
Tuesday at 11 AM.
Thank you very much and see you next time on Google
Developers Live.