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STEVE BAZYL: Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining us today.
I'm Stephen Bazyl and today we are joined with a special
guest, Brett van Zuiden from filepicker.io.
BRETT VAN ZUIDEN: How's it going?
STEVE BAZYL: Great.
So today we're going to do two things.
Actually, three things.
We have a recap of last week's Google I/O, then we're going
to talk a little bit about filepicker and some of the
great work you've been doing with Cloud APIs and where
things are going.
And we're also going to do a review of one of the apps that
was actually at I/O in the sandbox, Magisto.
So let's get started with I/O. So, Brett, you actually were
at I/O.
BRETT VAN ZUIDEN: I was.
I thought it was fantastic.
Definitely a lot of the cool new stuff coming out, not only
new functionality on the web, but also some sort of sneak
peeks into where we're driving and the rest of the Google
products are going.
STEVE BAZYL: Any particular highlights?
Things that were your favorites?
BRETT VAN ZUIDEN: The web components has been something
I've been watching for awhile, and the request autocomplete
was actually a new thing I hadn't
seen that got me excited.
STEVE BAZYL: Very cool.
I like the web components.
I'm a big fan of [? agular, ?]
I love where all that stuff is going as well.
So on the drive side, most of our talks are now available
online on the Developers.google.com/live and
on YouTube.
We'll put together a playlist of all the drive sessions
sometime this week so that you'll be able to find our
sessions pretty easily.
There are a lot of great ones.
One from Ali Afshar about using the app data for syncing
preferences on Android.
And they actually open sourced a library that was built for
that demo, and it's really cool and getting a lot of
interest already.
Brian and Cheryl also did a great talk on the real time
API that is well worth watching if you're interested
in using that API.
The sandbox was a great hit.
We had 24 different vendors come into the Google I/O
sandbox for those three days.
Some of those were for Google Drive, some were with Apps
Script and also the new Gmail feature for having actions.
Some really great demos and we're actually going to talk
about one of those later later today.
This is Magisto, a really, really awesome video editing
app that talks to Drive.
And Carrie will do a demo and walk
through that pretty quickly.
In terms of product announcements, we didn't
announce too much yet, but there's a lot in store for the
next couple weeks.
One thing we did talk about earlier, before I/O, was
storage unification.
So now your storage, for Google Drive, is shared
between Gmail and your Google+ photo attachments.
And we have, again, we have a lot of cool stuff coming up in
the next few weeks.
So let's talk about filepicker.io.
So for those who don't know it, can you give a little bit
of a background about what you've been working on--
BRETT VAN ZUIDEN: Sure.
STEVE BAZYL: --and what you're trying to solve for
developers.
BRETT VAN ZUIDEN: Of course.
So one thing that we're noticing with the migration of
content from the local devices to online, for me at least,
and for a lot of users, that Cloud is sort of the default
hard drive.
It's the default place where people are
storing their content.
That's everything from services like Google+ and
Facebook and Instagram for their photos, to Drive and
Dropbox, Inbox, for things like documents.
Even things like Gmail attachments.
And so what we wanted to do was say, let's provide a way
for developers to hook into all these different sources
and to provide that choice for their users and to be able to
access that wherever their users are
storing their content.
And so, obviously, a lot of the Google services play a
pretty central role in that, not only Drive, but also
Picasa and then Gmail attachments, but also making
sure that we connect into some of these and the other Cloud
services like Box and Dropbox.
And so we really tried to put those all together in a nice
package for developers so that they can say, hey, I want a
profile image and I want an image and it really doesn't
matter to me where that image comes from, whether it comes
from the webcam or somewhere online or even the hard drive.
So we bundle that up for them, provide it a nice clean API
and we take care of the rest.
STEVE BAZYL: Sounds awesome.
You want to show a demo?
BRETT VAN ZUIDEN: Sure thing.
So here you'll see this is pretty much as simple as it
gets here with the command.
So it is a fully JavaScript API.
We also have an API on Android and iOS that's fairly similar,
but just to show it here, so the command filepicker.pick,
you give us a callback function and we had you back
some data along with the URL to the file.
So here that's all the code that's necessary.
So here now, if I go and say OK, great.
Let's figure out--
OK, this is a pretty good document here.
I'm going to upload this and then we hand back a URL.
And now this will actually point directly to the content.
We'll also do things like store it on S3 for you, sort
of handle a bunch of the other common
actions that people want.
But for instance, if we wanted to say OK, what does this look
like if we specifically want images?
So if we say we want the mime type to be
image/jpeg say, great.
Run this, and now the selections will be limited
just to the jpeg images.
So now, if I go here, I select this-- oh, see, PNGs are not
allowed, I should have known that was going to happen here.
But close this.
We'll say we do actually want that PNG.
Go to Developers Live.
Here we go.
And uploaded successfully.
So now we can take this--
and this is a fully functioning URL.
This points directly to the data.
So that now you get this and, it's successful.
So that is full demo of the pick functionality.
There is also storing and saving out to the Cloud.
STEVE BAZYL: And you have a similar functionality for
mobile as well, right?
BRETT VAN ZUIDEN: We do.
STEVE BAZYL: Android and iOS?
Very cool.
That is probably about as easy as it gets to integrate with
Cloud storage.
BRETT VAN ZUIDEN: That's what we try.
And a few things here that we really believe, one is I'm
doing this all on a Chromebook.
And I think that really exposes some of the power and
some of the sort of movement that we're seeing.
I have access to everything that I need on this Chromebook
even if it's not sitting directly on the
device's hard drive.
Also, you notice, we passed around these URLs and one of
the things that we think we provide a lot of value in is
going from a pass-by value architecture where, whenever
you want to transfer content between Google Drive and your
application, or even from the hard drive and your
application, it's all done by sending
these big blobs around.
And so you have to configure your load balance or an engine
x and all those things, whereas for us, we turn it
into a URL for you.
We handle all that and then you can pass that URL around,
you can store that in your database, and it becomes much
easier to handle.
STEVE BAZYL: Definitely the way to go.
So your whole product is an API, and I was just curious
what lessons you had for people who maybe there's other
areas for services-- maybe not files-- but other areas of
technology where really the product is an API offering.
And what did you learn in the past few years as you got
started and what advice for the next filepicker.io?
BRETT VAN ZUIDEN: I'll start with some of the fun things
and then get into, I guess, some of the
more tangible things.
.io is actually a great domain name for signaling that you're
a developer product.
We, in some of our initial outreach back before people
had heard of us, we'd send emails to people and at first
they'd be like, well, I looked at the email, I thought it
might just be some spammy business person sending it and
then I saw the .io and I was like, ah, these guys are
developers.
.io, especially for us, it's input, output, Google I/O,
things like that.
So in terms of more on the business and strategy side,
it's really important that customer support stands first
and foremost.
When people--
and that goes everything from having great documentation to
having real people available to email.
So one of things that we still do is whenever someone signs
up we send them an email from a real person, we assign them
to a developer that says, I'm here to help you get started.
And for a lot of people, whether they're just trying it
out or whether they're building it into their
production app, that really goes a long way.
STEVE BAZYL: I definitely agree.
I've actually talked to a few of those people and everyone
has been super awesome on your team.
So I love everything filepicker.io is doing.
I think it's a great way to get started.
One of the concerns, for me at least, is it tends to bring
all the APIs down to the lowest common denominator.
And I was wondering, what advice do you have for
developers in terms of how do they make that decision as to
whether or not they use something like filepicker.io--
which is great for reaching a lot of users really quickly--
versus going very deep into one of the particular
providers and taking advantage of some of the
more advanced features?
BRETT VAN ZUIDEN: Sure.
STEVE BAZYL: How do you guide people?
BRETT VAN ZUIDEN: So we try to aim for what we call the
middle common denominator.
So we'll do things where we'll sort of up-level some of APIs
that aren't as good and provide the functionality that
makes them at least sort of on par with average.
We find though, is if you're building a real time document
collaboration, service, things like that, of course, there
are really those core APIs that you need to leverage.
That's great and we want to encourage that.
What we really find is we're sort of going for the broad
use case where people are saying, really what I want is
I just want to be able to import content to my
application, or allow the user to save it out.
And there's all I sort of want is a chunk of data and for
that I think that we can provide that very easily.
One of the things that we see, that we've worked with a lot
of people on, is if they need to do folder level operations
or commenting, there's a lot of richness in the Drive APIs,
as well as some of these other APIs.
For instance, we don't expose Facebook tags and things like
that to sort of unify them together.
So they're definitely situations where
I say, go for it.
Use the traditional APIs.
But if you can get away with saying, hey, really we just
want the content.
I think we can provide that need for you.
STEVE BAZYL: And in terms of adoption and growth, things
are looking good.
We're certainly seeing Drive growing like crazy.
I hope things are looking on your end as well.
BRETT VAN ZUIDEN: They are.
It's very exciting.
It's one of these things now where we're starting to reach
out and hit rate limits.
It's fun, though.
It's a lot of fun and we keep cranking along.
STEVE BAZYL: Awesome.
Stay tuned.
I'm going to turn it over to Carrie.
She is going to talk about really cool app, Magisto, and
show some of the inner workings of Google life here.
CARRIE ROWE: Hi everybody, I'm Carrie Rowe.
I'm on the Drive dev-rel team and I was at the Google I/O
the past week, and one of the apps that I was blown away by
in our sandbox was this app called Magisto.
And what they do, it's a video editing software app.
And I take tons of video on my Android phone, like minutes
and minutes of video every week, and I never look at it
and I never share it with people because
it's just not watchable.
So what Magisto does is it will automatically video edit
your videos for you and it makes it
really easy and magical.
So let's take a look.
So I'm on the Magisto website and let's go.
And what's great about--
let's see, continue.
What's great about Magisto is it's integrated with our
Google Drive products and so I can select my videos directly
from Google Drive.
So right here you see on their front page, I can either
select a file from my computer or I can select a file
directly from the Cloud.
And so I've taken a whole bunch of videos and I created
one yesterday with our dev-rel team right
here playing Foozball.
And so I'm going to select my video and then the next step
is I can select the background that I want.
And they have all these really great
pre-edited background styles.
So let's go with the street beats.
And then the next step, once you have your background, is
you can choose any music that you want to add.
So they're making every step really, really easy for you to
make a really great video.
So let's see, let's go with Lady Gaga.
And then the third step is you just hit Create, and it's as
easy as that.
And so I've already created the video, so
let's take a look.
And so yesterday I created about a minute long video of
our team playing Foozball.
So you can see that it's taken--
it's now shortened it into a 30 second video.
And what it's done is it's selected
all of the best clips.
So I know I'm not a professional videographer, so
when I take lots of video there tends to be a lot of
dead time and parts that aren't as interesting.
So it really creates and condenses it
into the best content.
And it adds in, you saw, the backgrounds of all the text
and images.
And then you can add music to it as well.
And then when you're done, you can share it with your friends
and family.
So this is a really great app to help you access your videos
more and share them with everybody.
And that's it for our app of the week.
And I'll turn it back to Steve now to talk a little bit about
what we have in store for you next week.
STEVE BAZYL: Thanks.
And I do believe my team actually won that game.
We did get interrupted with a freak quad copter accident
during that but it was actually a fun game and a
great serendipitous moment.
So for next week we are going to be here talking about how
you can work for Google Developer Relations.
We're going to talk about recruiting, some of the
activities that we do, things like I/O and, of course, the
Google Developer Live broadcasts and other
activities.
And for those who are interested in applying, we
will let you know how that process
works and what to expect.
One other announcement, that I forgot to do earlier, was we
actually have a winner for a raspberry pie.
And this is somebody who posted to Google+ with an
interesting anagram of the Google Drive SDKs, which
turned out to be Desk Evil Do Grogg.
And so it's K Powell Palmisano, hopefully I got
that correct.
We will reach out to you on the community and get your
contact information so we can send you a raspberry pie.
And we'll have some more opportunities for people to
get those in the future so, of course, stay tuned and join
the community.
And join in next week and learn more about what life is
like at Google Developer Relations.
Brett, thank you very much for joining us here today.
I know we have lots of cool stuff that you can do together
in the future to make it even easier for developers, so look
forward to seeing how things go.
BRETT VAN ZUIDEN: You and me both.
Thanks for having me.
STEVE BAZYL: All right.
And thank you Carrie for the awesome review on Magisto.
CARRIE ROWE: You're welcome.
Thanks for watching, guys.
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