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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--
STEVEN BAZYL: Hi, everyone.
We're back for another Google Developers Live, talking about
Google Drive.
And today we're going to do an app review
on ASTRO File Manager.
I'm Steven Bazyl and--
ALAIN VONGSOUVANH: I'm Alain Vongsouvanh.
STEVEN BAZYL: Yeah, so this is a great app.
This is one of the first mobile applications to
actually launch on Drive.
It's a file manager.
It's been around for a while.
They have, like I say, a lot of users, tens of millions,
and just recently, maybe about a week or two ago,
launched Version 4.
Now, it's a complete redesign of the application and
includes things-- and not just a redesign for the ICS and
Jelly Bean styles, --but also support for cloud services,
including Google Drive and Dropbox.
We'll take a look at that in just a moment.
I do have to get here.
I do want to show you the Play Store entry for this
application here.
And you can actually just see some of--
these are the older screenshots for the
application.
I'll just launch a few of these.
It was a good app.
Again, very popular, but I just want to give you a sense
for what the old style of the application is before we jump
into the new one.
So let's actually go switch over here.
We have it up.
I do have to apologize.
We are in landscape mode.
This app does look a little bit better in portrait.
So if you do have a Jelly Bean device, and you want to try it
out and explore it, you could do that.
But this is the landing page for the application.
A few features I want to point out before we dive into the
drive-specific functionality and how they did this--
and we'll talk a little bit more about Android development
for Drive as we go through this.
But in addition to having some very high-level functionality
here for accessing your files organized by type so you can
see documents, music, pictures, videos, my files,
these are all just built-in searches that will find all
the relevant files for you.
And the cool thing is it will actually do this across all
your different sources, whether it's an SD card,
Google Drive, Dropbox, or any other network location that it
happens to work with.
It does also have some built-in tools that make it a
little bit more powerful than just a file manager.
You can see card usage in terms of utilization, what
directories and files are taking up the most space, a
Task Killer.
Not something that you need on newer versions of Android so
much, but they're for people who do want to go in and just
force-kill different things, and, of course, an Application
Manager as well.
And if you swipe in the other direction, we can see all the
different locations.
We have our local storage.
We can access network locations over Wi-Fi, Drive
Dropbox, and again, these built-in searches here.
So, pretty useful.
And I'm just going to click on Music here, just to get the
basic idea of what this looks like.
You can see here it's finding different audio clips that are
on my device.
We can actually change this into a different view.
Thumbnails for music-- not very useful.
Let's go back to here, and how about
we'll do pictures instead.
So Pictures is something that works much
better in grid view.
You can see the default thumbnails here, but these
will fill in as it goes through and scans those files.
So most of these are actually on my local device here.
We can go over and look at Google Drive
functionality directly.
So I'm going to go, and I actually have this hooked up
to my Gmail account.
And we can see here, it's going to start to load.
It is a little slower than accessing
an SD card, of course.
That's to be expected.
But you can see here, it's actually already started to
load in the content.
We have thumbnails for different images.
These are little characters I made for a barbecue we're
having, PDF files, ZIP files, images.
Basically these are using-- you can even see here for the
PDFs, we're actually getting the thumbnail images as well.
And these are basically images that are generated
by the drive API.
And wall thumbnails, many of these images and documents as
possible, and they're just taking advantage of that to
give a really nice presentation here.
Using the app is--
let's go find a nice little Google duck.
I think I have in here a nice Drive demo folder.
Let's see if I can get to it here.
And we should have some ducks that--
let's try this one here.
So you could open that file.
And I think this is a Google Doc.
Or maybe it's not.
How about My Resume?
We'll use that as one.
We may be running into a little technical glitch here.
One thing I do have to warn you, this is a--
oh, this wasn't a Google Doc either.
It was actually just a Word doc.
So I actually just launched the built-in
document viewer for this.
I can go back.
Basically what I did want to find was a Google document.
Basically what this will do-- in the case of we know whether
it's a Google Doc or a spreadsheet or a
presentation--
is actually launch that with the built-in Google Drive app,
so very useful.
And Alain, you had done a presentation on integrating
Android apps with Google Drive back at I/O.
ALAIN VONGSOUVANH: That's correct.
STEVEN BAZYL: I know we've been a little bit slow to get
out one of the services that people have been waiting for,
the Google Play Services.
ALAIN VONGSOUVANH: Still not launched yet.
So Google Play Services has been announced at Google I/O
and hopefully should be available shortly.
It's a new set of services that will be coming to Android
devices starting from Froyo.
And it will provide a set of APIs that will make it easier
for developers to authorize web application to get access
to some Google APIs, such as Google Drive.
So, right now, the only way to get an access token-- well,
there are two ways.
The main one is using Account Manager.
But the token you get back is not linked to any API project.
So, because of that, the Drive API has no way to know which
API project is requesting access to which files.
And the Drive API introduced a new set of permissions.
Like an app can only request access to files that it has
access to or the user opened with these applications.
And because the Account Manager doesn't let Google
Drive know which API project is requesting access, the API
won't work when requesting and an access token with the
Account Manager.
So I believe what ASTRO is currently doing is using the
old API, which is called the Documents List API, I
guess Version 3.
STEVEN BAZYL: Yeah.
I believe so as well.
And it does have some
disadvantages for mobile devices.
So some of the features, like partial retrievals so you can
be selective in terms of the fields that you download, is
not available in that API.
But it is in the Drive API.
Actually, it's really important for mobile apps in
terms of minimizing bandwidth usage, so taking advantage of
things like gzip compression, selective
retrieval of fields--
ALAIN VONGSOUVANH: JSON metadata.
STEVEN BAZYL: Yeah, exactly.
The JSON is just a lot more compact to begin with.
I'm really anxious to get them onto the new API once those
Play Services are released.
ALAIN VONGSOUVANH: Yes, me, too.
STEVEN BAZYL: But they actually did
a really good job.
The nice thing is that the APIs are
functionally very similar.
You have the same type of metadata, access to the same
thumbnails, downloading files is pretty much the same,
regardless of which API you use to actually
search for the content.
So it shouldn't be that difficult of a
change for them to make.
And again, something we're really hoping to see once
those services are fully available.
A couple little features in the app I want to show.
Let's do--
so we can do long presses on different things
here to bring up--
we can actually Copy files, Move, Trash.
We can actually send these off to other applications.
And this is just using the regular Android intent.
We can actually send a Drive file to Google Drive.
I'm not sure what that would do.
But they also have properties.
So you can see here the name, path to the file, MIME types,
and everything.
So this is pretty useful.
There are some things that might be
useful for them to add.
So one of the things that's missing in here is you really
can't take advantage of Drive's sharing features.
So we have in the API the ability to manage the ACL,
share the file with users or groups.
That is not something that they've have exposed yet
through their UI, but it is available in the native Drive
client for Android.
I'm a little torn, personally, as to whether or not I would
recommend them actually recreating that feature.
It is a lot of work to build an ACL dialogue and pull in
Google contacts and the circles from Plus, and all
those different sources of information about
who to share with.
One thing that'll be interesting is, for example,
for web application, we have a sharing dialogue that's
embeddable with JavaScript.
I think it would actually be kind of cool if we could do
something similar for mobile applications.
ALAIN VONGSOUVANH: Yes, it's like providing intent from the
Drive app to start the sharing dialogue for a specific file.
STEVEN BAZYL: Yeah, it seems like that would be a really
great feature.
I know when you did your presentation, you talked a lot
about building viewers and editors for Android.
And it seems like that would be something to have that
share dialogue embedded in that mobile application, that
native application as you're working on the file and as
you're thinking about who to collaborate with.
ALAIN VONGSOUVANH: Yes, I agree.
So many of you may not know, but the Drive app on Android
has an open weave integration, the same open weave flow we
have on Google Drive Web UI.
So you can click on a file, and if Drive doesn't know how
to open, it will prompt the user with a dialogue showing
applications but can respond to this intent.
And this works the same way as the Drive Web UI.
So it will authorize the app to get access to the file and
then open the app with either the file ID, if they're
integrated with the intent, or the content
directly as a blob.
As Steve mentioned, it would be nice for the Drive app to
also provide intent to be able to share files from another
application, let another application start the sharing
process for a specific file.
STEVEN BAZYL: Yeah, definitely something that would be a
great feature.
And I think we'll have to file a feature request on our side
to see that in there.
Overall, I'm really happy with this application.
I mean, file managers are kind of one of those things where--
it's not something you use every day.
But since I've had ASTROs, since I've been working with
these guys, I do find more and more occasions to use them.
They're particularly great when using applications that
download files.
I have files in my download folder and my SD card.
I want to move those into Drive.
I've actually used that on a number of occasions already.
A lot of times when I uninstall applications, they
leave behind files.
It's a great way to go back and clean them up.
So it's not an everyday utility, but it's really,
really well done.
I love the new version of this application.
And as mentioned earlier, it is right now only available on
devices with Jelly Bean.
And I do know they're planning on rolling out
ICS in the near future.
It is really new.
There still are some kinks in there.
But I know the guys working on this.
They're hard at work making this really just a really
awesome app.
And there's not a lot of features that I think are
missing other than things like the drive sharing and other
features like that.
ALAIN VONGSOUVANH: Do you know if they use
the revisions feature?
Like can you get access to another revision of a file?
STEVEN BAZYL: That's a really good question.
And I don't think so.
Let's actually take a look at this one here.
So I know they have some Google Drive functionality.
These are your shortcuts.
On Properties, it does not look like it.
And if it is there, it's not necessarily
obvious how to get to.
But yeah, that's actually another really good
suggestion, is accessing revisions.
That would be something that's very Drive specific, though.
ALAIN VONGSOUVANH: That's correct.
STEVEN BAZYL: Although Dropbox actually has
revisions as well.
So for the file systems that have it, that would actually
be a really, really cool feature to add.
Yeah, it's a really, really well-done app.
And again, one of the first mobile apps that's really--
I mean, it's super deeply integrated with Drive.
In a lot of cases, you could use this in lieu of the actual
native Drive app.
If you happen to work on local file system and cloud file
systems together, it gives you a nice, unified interface for
doing that.
I'm trying to think.
Any other suggestions you think would be really useful
or features?
ALAIN VONGSOUVANH: Well, I'm thinking when the Google Play
Services launch, it will be nice for them to
migrate to a Drive API.
And I believe it will make things a lot easier for them
for the long run.
Like dealing with JSON metadata instead of XML, using
the lightweight client libraries we do provide for
Java and Android, a lot of this would make a lot of
things a lot more easier for them and for
developers in general.
STEVEN BAZYL: Yeah, definitely.
And again, for the performance improvements of just having a
lot smaller payloads is really important for mobile devices.
So I think a lot of developers are looking forward to having
the Play Services out there.
I know there is a ton of other mobile developers we've been
chatting to about Drive, and they're
anxious to get started.
So, I think that's all we have for this.
Again, you can check out the app, if you have a device with
Jelly Bean on it.
You can just download it from the Play Store.
Give it a try with Drive and Dropbox and just
stuff on your SD card.
And if you like the app, give it a review in the Play Store.
I think it's really solid and really enjoyed working with
these guys to make it a great app.
ALAIN VONGSOUVANH: Great.
STEVEN BAZYL: All right.
We will be back on Tuesday, is that right?
ALAIN VONGSOUVANH: On Monday.
STEVEN BAZYL: Monday.
Monday OK.
So, yeah.
Be back Monday.
I don't know what the topic is, but you can check out the
schedule on the Developers Live site, and we'll make sure
that's updated for Monday's topic.
OK, thanks.
ALAIN VONGSOUVANH: Bye.
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MALE SPEAKER: Shanghai GDG is a very
interesting developer community.
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