ALI AFSHAR: Hi everyone.
Welcome to Google Developers Live.
Today we're going to be talking about the Google Drive
SDK Early Access Program.
I'm joined today by Greg, and my name is Ali, and we both
work on Google Drive Developer Relations.
So thank you for joining in today.
If you've attempted to come to this video session in the
past, you know that we've actually failed
to put it on twice.
So I'm figuring third time lucky.
And thanks for your patience and thanks
for coming here today.
I think this is evidence that Google are capable of
recording a video and putting it on the internet.
So yes, yay, us.
But anyway, thanks for coming.
So what is the Early Access Program?
Well, we have a number of features coming up with Google
Drive and we would like people to use these in the real
world, real applications to use them and give us
recommendations on how they should improve.
We really take your feedback seriously and we really need
to test this out in the real world to see if the features
are what people need.
I don't mean to test it as in quality-- we test all the
quality and make sure everything works--
but we really want to know how well this fits in with your
applications and whether it's useful, how it could be more
useful, that kind of thing.
GREG KNOKE: So what can developers expect to see in
the Early Access Program, and what are the
requirements for them?
ALI AFSHAR: So we will take developers--
all kinds of developers, actually.
What they can expect is to be part of the mailing list, have
access to all new features as they come, so as they arrive,
we indicate this, we send an email to the mailing list and
you'll know about it.
And then you can be whitelisted
to use those features.
So they're hidden to all other developers.
They won't be able to use them.
So that's what you'll see, you'll see a regular stream of
new features added.
What do we expect?
Well, we kind of expect you to use them.
We hope that you will, and that's the whole point of it.
So there's no point in being on the program if you're not
going to use the features or you're not
going to give us feedback.
As I said, we're really desperate to
get this from you.
So they'll be part of a list and hopefully give us feedback
after trying the features.
GREG KNOKE: So what feature should developers be most
excited about?
What will they be able to implement now that they
wouldn't have been able to previously with their apps?
ALI AFSHAR: So that's the other side of it, and I'm glad
you raise that.
This also gives your application a jump on their
competition, really.
So you get these features early if you're [INAUDIBLE]
with Google Drive.
You'll be ready to launch this feature to production when the
feature itself launches on Google Drive.
So that gives you, I don't know, a few month head start
over all the other competitions.
So that's the other benefit.
What are the features we've got at the moment?
Well the first one is our real-time collaborative API.
We've spoken about that in the past.
It's a really cool thing, it allows multiple locked-in
sessions to collaborate in the same way that you can
collaborate over Google Docs when you get the little cursor
that moves around the screen telling you that Greg is also
editing this document.
That framework is available as a service for you to use on
your own files.
All part of our commitment to make your applications as good
and as complete and as feature-rich as the Google
Docs applications.
So that's the first one.
The second one we've got going at the moment is push
notifications, so when a file changes in Google Drive we
will send your application a notification of the change and
then you can look up to see what the changes happen.
That's really, really important for certain kinds of
applications that are either collaborative--
you want to see if someone else has edited it--
or, for example, a synchronizing or backup
application.
You only want to perform the backup when
something has changed.
You don't want to keep polling to see if the
change has taken place.
So you use push notifications.
So we have the real-time API, we have the push
notifications.
And quite excitingly, the features we're launching in
the next few weeks are all based around using Google
Drive as a collaborative--
as an application platform for your files.
So what do I mean by that?
We've added a way recently to hide certain
files from the user.
Your application will get a folder of its own that is
something like a configuration folder.
The user owns it, so they can delete it, but they can't look
at it and modify it.
So that's perfect for putting your configuration files or
any other files that are associated with your
application that you don't want user to edit--
backups of your applications data from a mobile app would
be perfect use case for this.
That's part of it.
The other side of the apps platform that we're building
is that you will have the ability to
add data onto files.
So you can decide, I want to tag this
file with my own data.
And that feature will be coming soon and added to the
Early Access Program.
So rather than before when we were going through individual
features and seeing who would like to try this out, who
should we try this out, we're opening this up to you.
You can innovate how you like.
We might not anticipate that you would be interested in a
certain feature, so that's why we're bringing them all
together and we're letting you go for that.
So push notifications, real-time collaboration,
application data, and meta data associated with files.
Those are the features we've got at the
moment, more to come.
If you want to apply, you need to go to our site--
developers.googl e.com/drive/earlyaccess.
One word, we'll publish the link.
There, you can fill out a form.
Thank you for all your applications.
As I said, we actually launched this a few weeks ago
and we've only got round to doing the video now.
Thank you for your applications--
we've had hundreds.
So going through them, we have quite strict criteria on the
kind of application that we think would be suitable.
So we're going through them and we should have a response
for everyone by the end of the week.
So thank you very much.
Those of you who haven't applied, now is a really good
time to do it because we've all got our reviewing hats on
so that will get done soon.
So firstly, thank you.
And secondly, we'll get back to you soon, and thanks for
your patience.
Right.
Any questions, Greg?
Anything to add?
GREG KNOKE: Sounds like you covered it all.
ALI AFSHAR: OK, brilliant, right.
Thank you all for coming.
Again, sorry about the previous videos that failed.
And we'll see you soon on Google Developers Live.
Thank you.
GREG KNOKE: Thank you.