Posted by Jeremy S. Meredith, Google Drive Activity API Team
Today, we are announcing a new version of the Google Drive Activity API, used to access the record of user activity in Google Drive. This new API offers an expanded data model to provide meaningful representations of actions, actors, and targets of activity in Google Drive. It also offers new features for filtering the results of requests made to the API.
The version of the API released today replaces the existing Drive Activity API v1, so you should migrate your applications to the new version of the API soon. We will shut down the v1 API on December 31, 2019. At that time, any application that depends on the v1 API will no longer work.
A migration guide is available to help with this transition to the new Drive Activity API v2. You may also want to read the overview and guides for the new version, peruse the reference documentation, or jump right in and try it out in the APIs Explorer.
Posted by Jason Douglas, PM Director for Actions on Google
The Google Assistant brings together all of the technology and smarts we've been building for years, from the Knowledge Graph to Natural Language Processing. To be a truly successful Assistant, it should be able to connect users across the apps and services in their lives. This makes enabling an ecosystem where developers can bring diverse and unique services to users through the Google Assistant really important.
In October, we previewed Actions on Google, the developer platform for the Google Assistant. Actions on Google further enhances the Assistant user experience by enabling you to bring your services to the Assistant. Starting today, you can build Conversation Actions for Google Home and request to become an early access partner for upcoming platform features.
Conversation Actions for Google Home
Conversation Actions let you engage your users to deliver information, services, and assistance. And the best part? It really is a conversation -- users won't need to enable a skill or install an app, they can just ask to talk to your action. For now, we've provided two developer samples of what's possible, just say "Ok Google, talk to Number Genie " or try "Ok Google, talk to Eliza' for the classic 1960s AI exercise.
You can get started today by visiting the Actions on Google website for developers. To help create a smooth, straightforward development experience, we worked with a number of development partners, including conversational interaction development tools API.AI and Gupshup, analytics tools DashBot and VoiceLabs and consulting companies such as Assist, Notify.IO, Witlingo and Spoken Layer. We also created a collection of samples and voice user interface (VUI) resources or you can check out the integrations from our early access partners as they roll out over the coming weeks.
Coming soon: Actions for Pixel and Allo + Support for Purchases and Bookings
Today is just the start, and we're excited to see what you build for the Google Assistant. We'll continue to add more platform capabilities over time, including the ability to make your integrations available across the various Assistant surfaces like Pixel phones and Google Allo. We'll also enable support for purchases and bookings as well as deeper Assistant integrations across verticals. Developers who are interested in creating actions using these upcoming features should register for our early access partner program and help shape the future of the platform.
Posted by Wesley Chun (@wescpy), Developer Advocate, G Suite
The G Suite team recently launched the very first Google Slides API, opening up a whole new set of possibilities, including leveraging data already sitting in a spreadsheet or database, and programmatically generating slide decks or slide content based on that data. Why is this a big deal? One of the key advantages of slide decks is that they can take database or spreadsheet data and make it more presentable for human consumption. This is useful when the need arises to communicate the information reflected by that data to management or potential customers.
Walking developers through a short application demonstrating both the Sheets and Slides APIs to make this happen is the topic of today's DevByte video. The sample app starts by reading all the necessary data from the spreadsheet using the Sheets API. The Slides API takes over from there, creating new slides for the data, then populating those slides with the Sheets data.
Developers interact with Slides by sending API requests. Similar to the Google Sheets API, these requests come in the form of JSON payloads. You create an array like in the JavaScript pseudocode below featuring requests to create a cell table on a slide and import a chart from a Sheet:
requests
sheetID
chartID
slideID
presentations().batchUpdate()
SLIDES
Creating tables is fairly straightforward. Creating charts has some magical features, one of those being the linkingMode. A value of "LINKED" means that if the Sheet data changes (altering the chart in the Sheet), the same chart in a slide presentation can be refreshed to match the latest image, either by the API or in the Slides user interface! You can also request a plain old static image that doesn't change with the data by selecting a value of "NOT_LINKED_IMAGE" for linkingMode. More on this can be found in the documentation on creating charts, and check out the video where you'll see both those API requests in action.
linkingMode
For a detailed look at the complete code sample featured in the video, check out the deep dive post. We look forward to seeing the interesting integrations you build with the power of both APIs!
In September, we launched a new way to search for content in apps on Android phones. With this update, users were able to find personal content like messages, notes, music and more across apps like OpenTable, Ticketmaster, Evernote, Glide, Asana, Gmail, and Google Keep from a single search box. Today, we're inviting all Android developers to enable this functionality for their apps.
Starting with version 10.0, the Firebase App Indexing API on Android lets apps add their content to Google's on-device index in the background, and update it in real-time as users make changes in the app. We've designed the API with three principles in mind:
There are several predefined data types that make it easy to represent common things such as messages, notes, and songs, or you can add custom types to represent additional items. Plus, logging user actions like a user listening to a specific song provides an important signal to help rank user content across the Google app.
Indexable note = Indexables.noteDigitalDocumentBuilder() .setUrl("http://example.net/users/42/lists/23") .setName("Shopping list") .setText("steak, pasta, wine") .setImage("http://example.net/images/shopping.jpg") .build(); FirebaseAppIndex.getInstance().update(note);
Integrating with Firebase App Indexing helps increase user engagement with your app, as users can get back to their personal content in an instant with Google Search. Because that data is indexed directly on the device, this even works when offline.
To get started, check out our implementation guide and codelab.
Originally posted on the AdMob blog
“It was clear that mobile devices were becoming more popular for working professionals. The trend was clear. While we did opt-out of building for smaller platforms, this opportunity was in line with our vision and it seemed promising. It seemed like a platform where our target users would be. It was a risk, but we took it.”
Originally posted on Google Apps Developers blog
Posted by Henry Wang, Associate Product Marketing Manager
Originally posted on DoubleClick Publisher Blog
At this point, you’ve read our recommendations for growing your app’s audience and keeping users engaged. But there are technical aspects, too, that can make or break your app’s success. Speed, for example, is crucial -- users expect apps to respond in under one second.
Yesterday, we gave recommendations for attracting, engaging, and retaining your users. Continue reading today to learn tips from Dev Gogate, Mobile Solutions Consulting Manager at Google, on providing your users with a high quality app.
Creating a high quality app is essential for building and maintaining a loyal user base. Follow Dev’s recommendations to optimize your app quality and stay posted for our post tomorrow on ways to effectively monetize.
Posted by Laurence Moroney, Developer Advocate
In October, we published a blog post about how Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) works with Doze in Android 6.0 Marshmallow to bring performance and usability improvements to the user. In this scenario, normal priority messages allow the device to stay in Doze, while high priority messages take the device out of Doze. For a great example of this capability and best practices on Android, we’ve spoken with the engineering team at Twitter.
Twitter has researched extensively which messages should get high priority -- given that this priority can awaken a device in Doze. To meet their particular need, Twitter wanted Direct Messages to be delivered on high priority, where mentions would be at normal priority.
Luke Millar, Android Engineering Manager at Twitter commented "With Android M we have a greater ability to be good citizens when it comes to conserving battery life. This feature lets us specify which notifications will wake up a device in Doze and which ones won't. Normally, we tell GCM to wait to deliver push notifications until the next time the user's phone wakes up. However, users expect to receive some push notifications immediately, like notifications for Direct Messages, so we set those as high priority. It's nice being able to specify when and how those notifications make it to our users."
To test Doze, Twitter’s engineers followed the steps outlined on the Android Developers site. These guide you to use adb commands to simulate doze on either a physical or virtual device. Following this method, Twitter was able to successfully test how their messaging priorities would work in a real-world environment.
One other best practice that Twitter used was in transmitting larger payloads, such as when delivering Twitter Highlights. In this case, they opted to pass metadata in the notification, which was then used to sync the application to get the requested Highlights. In other words, they didn’t transmit the contents of Highlights in a notification, instead triggering a sync mechanism to update the contents of the app.
For more details on using GCM with your app in standby environments, check out the documentation. You can learn more about Google Cloud Messaging and how to use it for notifications in your Android, iOS and Web Applications at the Google Developers site here.
Posted by Matt Hessinger, Project Specialist, Google Apps Script
Welcome to our 100th blog post on Apps Script! It’s amazing how far we’ve come from our first post back in 2010. We started out highlighting some of the simple ways that you could develop with the Apps platform. Today, we’re sharing tips and best practices for developing more complex Apps Script solutions by pointing out some community contributions.
The Apps Script editor does not allow you to use your own source code management tool, making it a challenge to collaborate with other developers. Managing development, test, and production versions of a project becomes very tedious. What if you could have the best of both worlds — the powerful integration with Google’s platform that Apps Script offers, along with the development tooling and best practices that you use every day? Now, you can.
npm install -g node-google-apps-script
This project, “node-google-apps-script”, is a Node.js based command-line interface (CLI) that uses Google Drive API to update Apps Script project from the command line. You can view the node package on the NPM site, and also view the GitHub repo. Both links have usage instructions. This tool was created by Dan Thareja, with additional features added by Matt Condon.
Before using the tool, take a look at the Apps Script Importing and Exporting Projects page. There are a few things that you should be aware of as you plan out your development process. There are also a few best practices that you can employ to take full advantage of developing in this approach.
There is a sample project that demonstrates some of the practices described in this post: click here to view that code on GitHub. To get all of the Apps Script samples, including this import/export development example:
Your standalone Apps Script projects live in Google Drive. If you use a command-line interface (CLI) tool like the one linked above, you can work in your favorite editor, and commit and sync code to your chosen repository. You can add tasks in your task runner to push code up to one or more Apps Script projects, conditionally including or excluding code for different environments, checking coding style, linting, minifying, etc. You can more easily create and push UI-related files to a file host outside of Apps Script, which could be useful if those same files are used in other apps you are building.
In addition to the information on the Importing and Exporting Projects page, here are a few things to consider:
Over and above the editing experience, the biggest improvements you get by working outside the script editor is that you are no longer locked into working in just one Apps Script project. You can much more easily collaborate as a team, with individual developers having their own working Apps Script projects, while also having more controlled test, user acceptance and production versions, each with more process and security. Beyond just the consistency with other normal project practices, there are a few Apps Script specific ways you can leverage this multi-environment approach.
If you are going to use this approach, here are three best practices to consider:
The provided sample shows a simple example of how a base configuration class could allow a developer to inject their local values for their own debugging and testing. In this case, the developer also added the annotation @NotOnlyCurrentDoc, which tells Apps Script that they need the full scope for Drive API access. In this project, the “production” deployment has the annotation @OnlyCurrentDoc, which leads to the OAuth scope that is limited to the document associated with script running as Sheets, Docs, or Forms add-on. If you add a standard file pattern to the source project’s “ignore” file, these developer-specific files will never get into the actual codebase.
Benefits for your project — Production can have more limited OAuth scopes, while a developer can use broader access during development. Developers can also have their own personal configuration settings to support their individual development efforts.
While there is no current way to trigger tests in an automated way, you still may want to author unit tests that validate specific functions within your projects. You’ll also likely have specific configuration values for testing. Once again, none of these files should make it into a production deployment. You can even use the Apps Script Execution API to drive those tests from a test runner!
Benefits for your project — You can author test functions, and keep them separate from the production Apps Script file. This slims down your production Apps Script project, and keeps the correct OAuth scopes that are needed for production users.
If you are developing an add-on for Sheets or Docs, and you expect to have an “active” item on the SpreadsheetApp. However when you are developing or testing, you may be running your Apps Script without an “active” context. If you need to develop in this mode, you can wrap the call to get the current active item in a method that also can determine what mode you are running in. This would allow your development or test instance to inject the ID of an “active” document to use for testing, while delegating to the getActive* result when running in a real context.
Benefits for your project — You can integrate better unit testing methodologies into your projects, even if the end deployment state dependents on resources that aren’t typically available when debugging.
You now have the option to use your own development and source management tools. While you still do need to use the Apps Script editor in your application’s lifecycle — to publish as a web app or add-on, configure advanced services, etc. — taking this step will help you get the most out of the power of the Apps Script platform. Remember to check out Apps Script on the Google Developers site to get more information and samples for your Apps Script development.
If you happen to use python tools on the command line to facilitate your team’s build process, you can check out Joe Stump's python-gas-cli. You can view the package info here or the GitHub repo where you’ll also find usage instructions.
Here are some additional reference links related to this post:
Originally Posted on Google Apps Developers blog
Posted by Muzammil Esmail, Product Manager, Google for Work and Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps
Over the years, we’ve been updating our APIs with new versions across Drive and Calendar, as well as those used for managing Google Apps for Work domains. These new services offer developers improvements over previous functionality and introduces new features that help Apps administrators better manage their domains.
To deliver even more granular control, today we are announcing the new Calendar Resource API as part of the Admin SDK’s Directory API that enables Google for Work customers to manage their physical resources, like conference rooms, printers, nap pods, tennis courts, walkstations, etc. These physical resources can be added to meetings by end users as needed. The API released today replaces the GDATA Calendar Resource API, so we encourage developers to begin moving their applications and tools to the new API. Please note that we will begin deprecation in January 2016 and sunset the existing API in January 2017. Stay tuned for a formal deprecation announcement with details.
Posted by Shanea King-Roberson, Program Manager
As a developer, writing your app is important. But even more important is getting it into the hands of users. Ideally millions of users. To that end, you can now learn what it takes to design, validate, prototype, monetize, and market app ideas from the ground up and grow them into a scalable business with the new Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree.
Designed by Google in partnership with Udacity, the Tech Entrepreneur Nanodegree, takes 4-7 months to complete. We have teamed up with most successful thought leaders in this space to provide students with a unique and battle-tested perspective. You’ll meet Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm”, Pete Koomen, co-founder of Optimizely; Aaron Harris and Kevin Hale, Partners at Y-Combinator; Nir Eyal, author of the book “Hooked: How to build habit forming products” and co-founder of Product Hunt; Steve Chen, Co-Founder of YouTube, rapid prototyping company InVision and many more.
All of the content that make up this nanodegree is available online for free at udacity.com/google. In addition, Udacity provides paid services, including access to coaches, guidance on your project, help staying on track, career counseling, and a certificate when you complete the nanodegree.
The Tech Entrepreneur offering will consist of the following courses:
Upon completion, students will receive a joint certificate from Udacity and Google. The top graduates will also be invited to an exclusive pitch event, where they will have the opportunity to pitch their final product to venture capitalists at Google.
Posted by Hillel Maoz, Engineering Lead, Search Console Team and Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst
Originally posted to the Webmaster Central blog
Wouldn’t it be nifty if you could track where your indexed app content shows up in search results, for which queries, which app pages are most popular, and which ones have errors? Yeah, we thought so too! So we’ve equipped our freshly renamed Search Console with new reports to show you how Google understands and treats your app content in search results.
Our goal is to make Search Console a comprehensive source of information for everyone who cares about search, regardless of the format of their content. So, if you own or develop an app, Search Console is your new go-to place for search stats.
Simply open Search Console and enter your app name: android-app://com.example. Of course, we’ll only show data to authorized app owners, so you need to use your Google Play account to let Search Console know you have access to the app. If you don’t have access to your app in Google Play, ask an owner to verify the app in Search Console and add you next.
Associating your site with your app is necessary for App Indexing to work. Plus, it helps with understanding and ranking the app content better.
The new Search Analytics report provides detailed information on top queries, top app pages, and traffic by country. It also has a comprehensive set of filters, allowing you to narrow down to a specific query type or region, or sort by clicks, impressions, CTR, and positions.
Use the Search Analytics report to compare which app content you consider most important with the content that actually shows up in search and gets the most clicks. If they match, you’re on the right track! Your users are finding and liking what you want them to see. If there’s little overlap, you may need to restructure your navigation, or make the most important content easier to find. Also worth checking in this case: have you provided deep links to all the app content you want your users to find?
If we encounter errors while indexing your app content, we won’t be able to show deep links for those app pages in search results. The Crawl Errors report will show you the type and number of errors we’ve detected.
We’ve created an alpha version of the Fetch as Google tool for apps to help you check if an app URI works and see how Google renders it. It can also be useful for comparing the app content with the webpage content to debug errors such as content mismatch. In many cases, the mismatch errors are caused by blocked resources within the app or by pop-ups asking users to sign in or register. Now you can see and resolve these issues.
To get started on optimizing and troubleshooting your own app, add it to Search Console now. If you want to know more about App Indexing, read about it on our Developer Site. And, as always, you’re welcome to drop by the help forum with more questions.
