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SILVANO LUCIANI: Hi, everybody.
Welcome back to Google+ Developers Live.
I'm Silvano Luciani, and I'm a developer programs engineer
for the Google+ platform.
JONATHAN BERI: And I'm Jonathan Beri, a developer
advocate on Google+.
Today, we're going to talk about some new features we
introduced to the Hangout apps platform to create a better
developer experience, and making it easier to develop
Hangout apps.
SILVANO LUCIANI: Yeah.
So my favorite is that we changed the way you can run
and test apps under development.
You would now be able to share your apps in a normal hangout,
right, Jonathan?
JONATHAN BERI: Yeah.
So let's take a look at the new developer experience.
So Silvano's going to start up a Hangout.
We actually have a new shortcut to make it even
easier to start a Hangout.
Go to hangouts.google.com/start, and
that will fire up a Hangout, so you don't even need to go
through chat and invite somebody in the beginning.
But he's actually going to go ahead and include me in here,
and I'm going to hop on board.
So as that's getting sent over to me, I'm going to get that
notification and jump on in.
Silvano has an app that we developed that he is a
developer on and I'm not.
I'm just a normal Hangout participant.
And so when he fires that up, the way to start that app is
even easier than before.
Instead of going to the developer console to find the
link to the Hangout, you can go to the Add App button, and
there's a tab there where you can find all the apps that
you're developing, whether you're the owner and creator,
or if somebody has added you to a project to start
developing a Hangout app.
Just going to fire that up.
Right now, you guys can't see my screen, but I can't see the
app that he's showing on the screen, because, again, I
don't have permission.
There's a button to share that to everybody in the Hangout,
and I can start using it, even though I've
never used it before.
Cool.
So now I'm in there, and you can see my name is showing up
there, because I'm running the app for this session.
With this experience, you can quickly enable people to come
in and test your app quickly and easily, and it's only for
the session.
So when I leave this Hangout, I can't go ahead and muck
around with the app, and Silvano can go ahead and tweak
it further.
SILVANO LUCIANI: And if, for example, you're hanging out
with friends, and you have an app you're currently working
on, and you want to get some feedback from them, it's as
easy as one click, share with them, see what they think
about, get the feedback, and go back working on the app.
JONATHAN BERI: And then to publish that app, it's the
same as before.
You go through the developer console, and you can make that
app publicly available to all the other users.
The next big thing that we announced at Google I/O and
that we're actively working on is a new release flow.
We have two release channels--
stable and beta.
So with the stable channel, these are APIs that you can
use in production today for published apps, and users can
start taking advantage of.
And it's very similar to what we had today.
When we released an API, it is currently available.
We introduced a new channel-- a beta channel--
that allows us to iterate more quickly, releasing early APIs
to get developer feedback.
So Silvano, let's see some of those features from the new
beta channel.
SILVANO LUCIANI: Yeah.
So the first one is the possibility of adding blur to
the background.
In this sample app, I have the bottom blur my room, and then
with the slider, I can, as you see, change the window size of
the blur to make it more or less strong.
And this is one of the first features that we added to the
development channel.
So remember, this is not available for apps that are
publicly available.
You can use it only on apps under development.
Another feature that we added is the [INAUDIBLE].
So we added to the simple game that will allow you to catch
the Chrome with you hand, and now, as you see, it's catched,
and it's in my hand.
I'll just show you the code for this.
It's very easy.
For the blur, you just need to create a background blur
object, and you can do it by calling gapi.hangout.
av.effects.creat ebackgroundblur(); and then
just set the blur window size.
And what you've seen in the app is just a slider that is
updating the sides of the blur window.
For the hand tracking, what you can do is add a listener
to the on hand tracking data changed event.
This will be called every time the hand is detected, and the
position of the hand change.
And, for example, in this function update hand position,
we can check what happens.
We check on the event if there is a hand detected, and if the
hand is detected, we get the position of the center.
Then we have other functions in the game that are actually
comparing the position of the hand with the Chrome logo, and
understanding it fits in the range of the hand.
One thing that I want to show to you is there is only one
hand that is tracked on the screen at the moment, and you
can see we can do things like this.
But the Chrome would be always stay on one hand.
JONATHAN BERI: Now, that API looks very similar to the
other effects APIs that we have.
Is that a final API?
How is that documented?
Where can we learn more about those APIs?
SILVANO LUCIANI: So you can find docs on the dev channel
at developers.googl e.com/plus/hangouts/api-dev.
These docs are always evolving, because these apps--
the apps in the development channel--
are under development.
So if you're using these APIs, come back often to check if we
made any changes.
And we also we really want you to use these APIs, and we
really want you to provide us with feedback, and you can do
it by using our issue tracker in the developers community.
JONATHAN BERI: And we also really want to engage with
developers to learn early, and about their
feedback on these APIs.
So we want you to use the Google+ community we have for
the Google+ developers' platform, especially using the
Hangouts category.
And that's where you can come and provide feedback, what you
think about the API design, features that we're missing,
and other features you want to see.
And not only is it us, the Google Developer Relations
team working on Google+, but the engineering team is also
in there hearing your feedback, responding to your
questions to make the product better.
So really engage with us there.
And if you have issues, we also we have a tag on Stack
Overflow that we actively monitor, whether it's for our
Hangout apps, or other features
of the Google+ Platform.
SILVANO LUCIANI: And the tag is Google-+.
JONATHAN BERI: Google-+.
SILVANO LUCIANI: And also, I already
mentioned the issue tracker.
So if you're using this development API, and you have
any suggestions for improvement or feedback on the
usage, please use our issue tracker.
But also, if you have general bugs, or feature requests
about the Hangouts API or any other of the Google+ platform
functionalities, please use the issue tracker.
And also star issues and feature requests, because we
use the number of stars for each of those to
prioritize our work.
So I think that's all for today.
Come back next Tuesday.
We will be here again with a new super interesting topic on
the Google+ platform.
JONATHAN BERI: Bye.
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