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MALE SPEAKER: Shanghai GDG is a very
interesting developer community.
FEMALE SPEAKER: I'm glad somebody
has asked this question.
MALE SPEAKER: This is where the magic happens.
FEMALE SPEAKER: This is primarily a question and
answer show, so if any of you out there
would like to ask questions.
STEVE BAZYL: Hi, everyone.
I'm Steven Bazyl.
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: I'm Alain Vongsuvanh.
STEVE BAZYL: And today, we're going to do an app review of
what I think is actually a really cool app.
This is InstallFree Nexus.
They actually have two versions of this app, one with
LibreOffice, another one with Microsoft Office.
We're going to take a look at the LibreOffice version today.
I think it's actually a really cool app.
Have you had a chance to play around with this much?
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: Yeah, this is really nice, because as
we're moving towards storing our files in the cloud, many
of us have Legacy files on our hard drive.
It's true that Google Docs and Google Drive has a doc editor
which nice to use, but users want to be able to open the
Legacy files and edit them on the web.
STEVE BAZYL: So if you have something where maybe the
formatting is a little too complicated for us, then you
actually can use the real version of those products in
the web, and it's actually really cool.
So let's just take a look at their Chrome listing page.
You're going to see here, InstallFree Nexus with
LibreOffice and some screenshots.
I already have the app installed, so I'm not going to
go through that entire process.
But I just wanted to show it's a pretty well-done page here
that explains the app, and similarly, with the Office
version as well.
Really important to have these Chrome Web Store pages for
people to discover your apps and explain what they do.
But really, we care about the app itself
and some of the features.
Here I have in my drive just a couple files
that I created earlier.
Let's just see what this experience is like.
So let's go create a LibreOffice file.
And you're going to see here an interesting design issue.
And this is partly the way the product works and partly a
limitation in the Drive SDK.
But you see here that I have to choose what type of while I
want to create.
And I think it would be nice if we had this in the SDK,
where we could actually--
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: Create new presentations.
STEVE BAZYL: Exactly.
Have multiple actions in the UI.
But right now, because they want this to be one install
action for the users, they have to have
this in their app.
But something we can improve upon in the SDK, but I think
they handled it really well given that limitation.
And let's just create a doc.
The cool thing about this is what they're actually doing is
spinning up LibreOffice in a virtual machine in the cloud
and giving us remote desktop, RDP, in our browser.
That's actually kind of mind blowing when
you think about it.
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: First time you run it, it's just like,
whoa, you're running a desktop?
STEVE BAZYL: Exactly.
So we have the full version of this.
If we were doing the Office version, we'd have just
regular Microsoft Office running in our browser.
And we can just start typing away.
[TYPING]
STEVE BAZYL: So not a very exciting doc, but
let's go and save it.
And here, we'll save in our Documents, and give it a nice
little file name.
Having a little trouble typing today.
And it should be saving.
And here we go.
There's the file.
We have our file we created.
We can close that, open it back up, and we should be
right back to where we did.
One of the issues with running an app like this that is a
little heavy, the startup time is slower than using a full
web-based editor like Google Docs.
So you have a little bit a trade-off in terms of startup
time versus features and
functionality, but here we are.
We're back to where we were with our file.
Earlier I created this directory, and this actually
goes back to a GDL that we did last week.
It was Ali and I, and we talked about the differences
of drive versus a file system.
And some of the issues--
one, in particular, is disambiguating files because
we don't have this restriction that file names are unique.
So what do you think is going to happen when we open this up
in this directory in LibreOffice?
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: As I can see, you have two files with
the same name, so I guess you're going to have a hard
time handling this, and only show one of the two.
Which one?
I don't know.
STEVE BAZYL: Yeah, Well, that's a good question.
So let's go in here.
And you can see here, they actually created basically a
virtual file system in Windows, and I can just
navigate through my drive content here.
And as you guessed, they only show one file.
Unfortunately, I don't know which one they've actually
shown without actually opening this up.
So what should they do in this case?
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: They should show both of the files, maybe
having a way to identify that those two files are different.
STEVE BAZYL: So putting like a suffix on one of them with
like a version or time stamp--
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: Yeah.
STEVE BAZYL: --or something like that?
So this is actually a pretty significant issue.
It looks like they probably should have about the same
time stamp.
Not entirely sure which one that is.
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: You can save it and see what the
new time stamp is.
STEVE BAZYL: That's true.
Let's actually do that and see what happens.
Oh, interesting.
They're giving me--
let's modify it first and then save it.
And, there we go.
So it was this one.
So, yeah, it's a little bit of a wart on the user experience
there, in that if you do have files with the same name, it's
a little bit difficult, or actually nearly impossible, to
make sense of what happens in that case.
The good part, though, is that you can access the application
fully from within the Drive UI.
They also have their own file viewer inside their web
application which lets you navigate.
And in this case, they actually do
display the files correctly.
So it's just within that virtual file system where it's
not quite handled entirely correct.
So to make this possible, one of the things I have to do is
request access to all my files.
What are your thoughts on that?
Is that the right decision in this case?
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: We're trying to move away from the broader
scope which gives an app access to an
entire user's drive.
But as we are building a virtual file system, they
don't have a choice but to request access to another
user's drive.
One other way we could do it is only list files they have
access to or created, but that will limit the user experience
for the application.
STEVE BAZYL: Right.
So in that case, if they were to do a file open from this,
all their Legacy files that they haven't yet launched
probably wouldn't show up in this case, right?
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: Yes.
STEVE BAZYL: So, it's an interesting challenge for apps
like this, where they need to have an integrated File
Explorer, but I think the value of having this actually
behave like a real desktop application and then look like
it has a file system probably was the right
decision for them.
But they could have done a more restricted version that
doesn't require as much permission.
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: And that uses the picker API.
STEVE BAZYL: Yeah, that would be interesting.
Any thoughts on ways that they would be able to get the
picker to work inside a native desktop experience like this?
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: It should be hard, because they'll have to
fire the picker on the client side, on the browser, and ask
the user to choose a file, and send it back to the server.
So it won't really show as a native file picker.
It will show with the Google Picker API UI.
STEVE BAZYL: Yeah.
I think it would be an interesting experiment to
figure out if that is possible.
And personally, I'm not familiar enough with the
OpenOffice and Office APIs to know how easy it is to plug in
or replace those menu options.
But I think it would be something that would be a good
experiment for somebody to try and see if that's possible.
It definitely would help a lot on the security side to be
able to switch over to that more
restrictive per file access.
Let's just take a quick look at some of the other editors.
We can create another one.
What do you want to create this time?
We can do a spreadsheet.
We can do a presentation.
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: What do you think?
STEVE BAZYL: How about we do a drawing?
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: Drawing, yeah.
Never tried this one.
STEVE BAZYL: You actually have access to the full suite.
And again, you have the Microsoft
version of these as well.
And let's see if my art skills are any good.
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: You need a trackpad?
STEVE BAZYL: Yeah.
I have a feeling I'm going to do a not so good job here, but
you can draw some lines.
Oops.
Maybe this was the wrong demo to do, as I am not very
familiar with the OpenOffice drawing here.
Here's some tools down here.
So we'll draw a very, very, very simple smiley face.
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: You're back to selecting.
STEVE BAZYL: LibreOffice is not making me very happy here.
I have terrible, terrible art skills.
There's my slightly happy, slightly upset smiley face.
And we could do spreadsheets as well, presentations.
And this actually handles not just LibreOffice, but I think
they actually do conversions on Microsoft formats and other
common formats as well.
So a really powerful application for working with a
lot of files that you may have had on your desktop before and
you're moving into the cloud.
If you're not quite ready to convert those over to Google
Doc formats, something like InstallFree Nexus is a really
good transitional tool to get you into the cloud, but
without having to fully commit to converting those into a
format that's in Google Docs.
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: But you still get the features of
Google Drive, like sharing.
STEVE BAZYL: Yeah.
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: You don't get collaborating, but you can
share a file with another user, and they can use the
same app as long as they have it installed and open it with
LibreOffice as well.
STEVE BAZYL: Exactly right.
So we can share this with other users using the same
sharing features of any file and drive.
Once that user gets it, they'll actually get alerted
that this file was created by that application.
They'll have an opportunity to install it and start taking
advantage of it.
So is there anything else about this that you
want to show off?
I think you were curious about be the approval screen.
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: Yes, the codes they are requesting.
STEVE BAZYL: So let's just take a look at that.
What we'll do is just revoke this here temporarily.
I'll remove, and then we can go back to Chrome Web Store,
add it back in.
And we'll do a little refresh.
So in theory, this time I should get a prompt.
So here's the full list of all the things
that they're accessing.
So we have account information for single sign-on, full
access to all of our documents.
So again, you can see just how much data they're actually
asking for here.
All of our documents, they can download anything, create,
move, all that stuff.
And you can see why there's so much emphasis on moving
towards the per file scope, because this really is a lot
of power that you're giving the applications.
And it's really nice from a user perspective to be able to
say I only want to give you access to the handful of files
that are really important for your app.
What else?
Everything else looks pretty normal--
email address, spreadsheets, photos and videos.
So they actually have a lot of functionality in here.
And we haven't even really looked at some of the photo
capabilities, but I think they actually pull in some stuff
from Picasa and so on as well.
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: So you can integrate in a doc.
STEVE BAZYL: Yeah, that's true.
Right.
Yeah, exactly.
Import photos into a documentation, and so on.
So, we'll just grant access again, and we're back to where
we started.
So what are the things you would like to see in the app?
Is there anything other than the issue we saw earlier with
the virtual file system?
Any features or things that you would like them to do
differently?
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: Do you know if they use the revision
features on Google Drive?
STEVE BAZYL: That's a really good question.
Certainly, I haven't seen anything within the app for
doing this.
I know some of the Office formats have revisions built
into the file itself.
But we should be able to go into here, for example, and
say Revisions, and it is actually creating them.
So this is just a feature of Drive, and I believe by
default, we do create a new revision.
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: On every update, yes.
STEVE BAZYL: So, they didn't really have to do anything
special to get that.
So I can go in here and I can do this.
Or if it's a file format that has built-in revision history,
we can use that as well.
But it's a really amazing app, I think.
Just the fact that this is a remote desktop, the full
version of these applications in a browser, and they're not
really running any special plugins or anything.
I think it's just Canvas and WebSockets, and it works on
Chromebooks.
It works on a full browser like Chrome
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: As long as you have a modem browser,
you're good to go.
STEVE BAZYL: Exactly.
And it really is just, I think, a crucial piece in
getting people from the desktop into the cloud and
onto truly being able to work from any device.
The only thing I haven't tried this on,
actually, is a mobile device.
I'm not optimistic that it's going to be a great experience
running Office on a mobile phone.
But it might actually be OK on a tablet and something that
we'll give a try and let folks know how it goes.
But definitely something I'm really excited about, and just
an overall solid app.
They do have to fix some technical issues.
And if you're watching our friends at InstallFree, you
can take a look at last week's GDL on file systems and
disambiguation and hopefully fix that one little issue.
Any final thoughts?
ALAIN VONGSUVANH: Again, as you've been mentioning many
times, I think this is a really good app to have.
It helps users move away from Legacy file systems and into
the cloud, have the files backed up in a secure server,
and have the files accessed everywhere.
They can use sharing to share files instead of sending a
specific file via email, have multiple users edit those
files using the same app, and see what other users do on the
same file instead of sending a file, getting it back, trying
to merge for revisions, et cetera.
STEVE BAZYL: Yeah.
So I think that's it for today.
Thank you, everyone, for coming, and
we'll be back on Thursday.
I don't know if the topic has been set, but I'm sure it will
be a very good GDL again.
So, thanks for watching and stay tuned.
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