Google Data

By Greg Robbins, Software Engineer

(Editor’s note: Today’s blog post is another cool one for programmers in the audience. Non-developer readers, thanks for bearing with us.)

Mac OS X and iOS provide developers with a high-level class, NSURLConnection, that makes interacting with servers pretty easy. NSURLConnection follows the system networking preferences, navigates through proxies, and handles other details just as users expect on their devices. But in applications that require a series of server requests and responses, NSURLConnection can be inconvenient to use. All connections made by an application’s class call back into a single set of delegate methods, and when there are numerous connections to be made, sorting out the responses is a bit of a chore.

So ever since Google’s first Mac application, Gmail Notifier, we’ve used a wrapper around NSURLConnection to make it easier to issue http requests. After years of being hidden away and evolving inside of other projects, the Google Toolbox for Mac HTTP Fetcher has now been promoted to its own Google Code open source project. Though simple to use for basic GETs and POSTs, it also offers a variety of convenient features for developers of networking applications.

Here is an example of using the fetcher to make a request of a server:

#import "GTMHTTPFetcher.h"

NSURL *url = [NSURL URLWithString:@"http://www.example.com/"];
NSURLRequest *request = [NSURLRequest requestWithURL:url];
GTMHTTPFetcher* myFetcher = [GTMHTTPFetcher fetcherWithRequest:request];
[myFetcher beginFetchWithDelegate:self
             didFinishSelector:@selector(myFetcher:finishedWithData:error:)];

and when the request is complete, the fetcher invokes a single callback in the application:

- (void)myFetcher:(GTMHTTPFetcher *)fetcher 
  finishedWithData:(NSData *)retrievedData 
  error:(NSError *)error {
  // if error is not nil, the fetch succeeded
}

One class can initiate many fetches, each with their own callback selectors, making it easy to pack a lot of networking into a single class. In iOS 4 and Mac OS X 10.6, Objective-C blocks simplify fetching even further, avoiding the need for callback methods:

[myFetcher beginFetchWithCompletionHandler:^(NSData *retrievedData, 
   NSError *error) {
    // check the error and use the retrieved data here
  }];

As with the underlying NSURLConnection class, the fetcher’s requests are always asynchronous, so the user experience is never blocked waiting for a server response.

This basic http fetcher functionality requires adding just a single source file and header to an application. But the fetcher comes with support for many more advanced features, such as automatic retry on errors, cookie handling, ETag tracking and response caching, convenient request and response logging, and multi-part MIME upload.

To get started using the GTM HTTP Fetcher, read the introduction at the project site, and join the Google Toolbox for Mac discussion group. You can find even more of our open source resources for iOS and Mac developers at the Google Mac Developer Playground.

By Greg Robbins, Software Engineer

(Editor’s note: Long-time readers know we sometimes publish posts aimed at programmers, and this is one of those. If you’re not a software developer, don’t worry. Our usual non-technical stuff will return.)

It’s rare today for any software to live in isolation. And often, applications want to connect to data in your Google Account. Social networks seek access to your Gmail contacts, finance programs try to sync with your Google Finance portfolio, and photo editing software would like to add eyeglasses and mustaches to the photos in your Picasa Web Albums account. But you probably don’t want your photo editing program to be able to download your financial portfolio, spend money with your Google Checkout account, or have access to any of your other personal data.

The fundamental problem is that giving your username and password to a program hands it access to all of your data. Recently, Internet software developers have converged on a solution called OAuth. When sites and software support OAuth, you only need to give your username and password—your credentials—to the site where your data belongs, and that site passes a token with strictly limited authorization rights back to other sites and software.

For example, if you want to use the new SuperAwesomeEditor application to trim your YouTube videos, the editing program can use OAuth to ask YouTube for permission to edit your videos, and then YouTube will ask you to verify your identify. Once you give your username and password to YouTube, it will hand back to SuperAwesomeEditor a token allowing it access just to your YouTube videos for editing. SuperAwesomeEditor won’t know your password, so it won’t be able to grab your financial documents or check out your Gmail contacts. And tomorrow, if you change your mind, you can tell YouTube to cancel that token, and suddenly SuperAwesomeEditor will be unable to access your videos at all. Now you’re in control of your personal data.

OAuth offers another big advantage: it gives the data provider flexibility in how it authenticates you. So today you may be asked for your username and password, and also to solve a captcha to prove you’re human. Tomorrow, with tighter security, the provider can add another means of authentication, perhaps by sending a text message to your phone with an extra passcode to type when signing in. Improvements in user authentication over time like this aren’t possible in software that only knows how to ask for a username and password.

Unfortunately, the rose of OAuth comes with thorns. One bit of pain is that it takes a lot of tricky programming for applications to use OAuth for authentication. Another downside stems from OAuth having been designed to allow one website to obtain authorization from another; it is not well-suited for use in installed applications, such as native iPhone, iPad, or Mac OS X software.

To encourage adoption of OAuth by Mac and iOS apps, we have released the Google Toolbox for Mac OAuth Controllers. This small set of Objective-C classes makes it easy for developers to add OAuth sign-in embedded into Cocoa apps. Since adoption of OAuth extends beyond Google, the OAuth controllers work with both Google and non-Google data providers.

Here’s how easy it is for developers to let users sign in to Google Contacts with OAuth from an iPhone application:

#import "GTMOAuthViewControllerTouch.h"

NSString *keychainItemName = @"HotSocialNetwork: Google Contacts"
NSString *scope = @"http://www.google.com/m8/feeds/"; 
 // scope for Google Contacts API

GTMOAuthViewControllerTouch *viewController =
 [[[GTMOAuthViewControllerTouch alloc] initWithScope:scope
  language:nil
  appServiceName:keychainItemName
  delegate:self
  finishedSelector:@selector(viewController:finishedWithAuth:error:)] 
    autorelease];
[[self navigationController] pushViewController:controller animated:YES];

When the user finishes signing in, the controller will invoke the application’s callback method:

                    
- (void)viewController:(GTMOAuthViewControllerTouch *)viewController
  finishedWithAuth:(GTMOAuthAuthentication *)auth
             error:(NSError *)error {
 if (error == nil) {
   // Authentication succeeded; retain the auth object
 }
}

That’s it. The controllers handle displaying an embedded web view and interacting with the server, and optionally saving the authorization token in the keychain. Later on, the application can use the auth object provided to the callback to authenticate and sign requests it makes to the server, like this:

[auth authorizeRequest:myNSURLMutableRequest];

Authenticating to non-Google services takes a few more lines of code to specify the application’s identity and the server addresses needed for authorization, but it’s almost as simple.

The OAuth protocol is in transition, as a newer version is currently being developed. But if you are a developer, there is already benefit to adopting OAuth for letting your users sign in to Google and other services. For more information about using the GTM OAuth controllers in your app, read the introduction at the project site, and join the discussion group. Google also maintains a site for our ongoing research into OAuth and related subjects.

The OAuth Controllers are an independent sibling project to the Google Toolbox for Mac, a collection of useful classes for iPhone and Mac developers. The controllers incorporate the newly-liberated GTM HTTP Fetcher project, our networking wrapper class, which I’ll discuss in an upcoming post. You can find more of our open-source Mac and iPhone toys on the Google Mac Developer Playground at http://code.google.com/mac.

By Greg Robbins, Software Engineer(Editor’s note: Long-time readers know we sometimes publish posts aimed at programmers, and this is one of those. If you’re not a software developer, don’t worry. Our usual non-technical stuff will return.)It’s rare …

By Mike Morton, Google Mac Team

Google engineer Mike Morton has now made it home after a week of sipping at the firehose known as Apple WWDC in San Francisco. In today’s post, Mike shares his thoughts and observations as the conference winds down — and so do the attendees.

Thursday was a good day. I attended interesting talks, and I got lots of good info from talking to Apple folks in the labs. I left before Friday, the last half-day of the conference.

As the week goes by, some attendees start nodding off in talks. I don’t think that’s a reflection on the speakers, just on the cumulative sleep deprivation of the conference. I’m pretty sure I’ve kept my eyes open the whole time, even though some of the material is review for me, and other stuff is over my head. A lot of the talks on my last day were about making applications efficient on iPhone and iPad. Here, “efficiency” is not just how quickly they respond, but other measurements, too, such as how long they can make the battery last. Battery life weighs on my mind as I try to find a seat next to a power outlet for my laptop. I sometimes feel like Shakey, an early robot whose sole purpose was to find power plugs.

Labs continue to be a great source of info. I met my colleague Paul on the escalator and he excitedly told me that the answer he’d just gotten to one question was worth the whole price of the conference. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I’m impressed at Apple engineers who are willing to sit down, look at our code, work through questions, and draw diagrams on a whiteboard.

Between talks and labs, there’s non-stop schmoozing. Some of it is totally business-oriented, but much is just chatting and discovering connections. I bumped into two fellow Dartmouth grads. Both attended after my time, but at least they graduated in the same millennium as I did. I also took several breaks just to observe nerd behavior. One scary trend: some people walk around while looking at an iPhone and an iPad at the same time. Miraculously, nobody accidentally walked into a window or escalator.

The famous James Dempsey and the Breakpoints performed this week. I missed it, but here’s a shaky video.

So Thursday ended and I walked out to catch my redeye. The end of a conference is always an anticlimax, especially so when you leave early. There ought to be some sort of reminder that we’ve come together once again, and that Apple has gone from just surviving to thriving and changing the world. Apple people have a tremendous sense of history, and love to talk about who worked on what when. We see the past more clearly than the future, but we know the future often echoes the past.

I wound up at SFO in the world’s slowest security line. I removed my belt. Then I lifted my arms to get scanned. Somehow my pants didn’t fall down. Maybe it was that Moscone Center food.

I fell asleep on the plane and woke up as we landed at Logan. The guy next to me was putting away a nose-hair trimmer. Perhaps he was getting ready for FaceTime.

See you next year!

By Mike Morton, Google Mac TeamGoogle engineer Mike Morton has now made it home after a week of sipping at the firehose known as Apple WWDC in San Francisco. In today’s post, Mike shares his thoughts and observations as the conference winds down — an…

By Mike Morton, Google Mac Team

Google engineer Mike Morton eschews sleep (mostly) while attending Apple’s WWDC in San Francisco. Here’s his account of day 3 in the life of an iDeveloper.

Things are settling into a routine. After dinner, I retreat to my hotel room and wrestle with the wifi to catch up on email and look at tomorrow’s sessions. I worry about which sessions to skip so I can visit scheduled labs and pump Apple engineers for advice. Today I attended four sessions and skipped two. That ratio seemed about right.

Many labs are busy. I waited a long time to ask a couple of questions about Core Data. That’s an Apple technology for storing info, not related to the phylum chordata. After an hour, I gave up. But the busiest lab is the one for User Interface consulting, where you can show your prototype application to Apple UI gurus and get advice. This takes place in private rooms, because prototypes are often secret. Unlike other labs, this one takes reservations, and by early morning they’re booked for the whole day. That must be frustrating for folks who don’t get a slot, but I’m glad that so many people care about the fit and finish of their apps.

Today’s sessions were great…but of course the non-disclosure agreement won’t let me tell you about them. During one session, I took frantic notes, emailed them off to my team on the east coast, then got questions back that I asked at a session an hour later. Technology is so useful!

I caught most of a lunchtime talk by Pixar Senior Technologist Michael Johnson about Pixar’s internal software projects. His talk was fast-paced and witty, with a lot of lessons about how to make good in-house software. He mentioned one important deal that happened because of a conversation at WWDC’s annual beer bash. The clear lesson was that beer bashes are an important part of the industry. Just as we always suspected.

In between sessions and labs I caught up with old friends and colleagues. I’ve been doing this for a while, and sometimes I get a little behind. I asked one friend about his toddlers, and he showed me a photo of his older daughter in an evening gown. Other parents are fretting about college choices and driver’s licenses. It’s nice to be reminded that geeks have a life, too.

Some non-geek friends have been in touch by email, curious about what’s going on. They’re especially interested in FaceTime, and other possible uses for the front-facing camera. One friend suggested that it will make a handy mirror. That gives me a great idea for an app: Do I Have Spinach in My Teeth?

Thursday is my last day. I’m taking a redeye home Thursday night. Friday is supposed to be a work day. We’ll see how that goes. And now it’s time to start packing.

By Mike Morton, Google Mac TeamGoogle engineer Mike Morton eschews sleep (mostly) while attending Apple’s WWDC in San Francisco. Here’s his account of day 3 in the life of an iDeveloper.Things are settling into a routine. After dinner, I retreat to my …

By Mike Morton, Google Mac Team

Google engineer Mike Morton somehow finds time to blog from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco while also learning, socializing, eating, and occasionally sleeping. Read today’s entry for more.

Day 2 had barely begun, and I felt like I’d been here a week. The constant time-juggling is a challenge: attend a session, ask questions in a lab, eat, sleep, work, schmooze? Before heading to Moscone West, I chatted in the hotel lobby with other attendees about the time challenge. One first-timer told me his friends simply suggested he get to as many parties as possible.

I spotted an attendee wearing a “hi, i make macintosh software” t-shirt. I noticed later that “macintosh” is an anagram of “Hm, iOS can’t”.

Breakfast at Moscone featured uninspiring food, but inspiring conversation. A friend and I sat at a table with four folks we didn’t know, all with different interests. One was a grad student, doing systems for kids with various disabilities. He asked the accessories engineer if one could build a simple device with just two buttons, for simple apps for his students with motor coordination problems. The accessories guy reached into a bag: “Like this one?”. He showed us Pong running on his iPhone, using the extra hardware to control it!

Last year, the show had a huge display of app icons, each one jiggling each time it was downloaded. This year’s display was different: app icons fell from the top like meteors, one for each download. Popular apps showed their icons over and over. That made it a lot easier to find Google Earth, which I never did spot last year — and Google Mobile seems to be “selling” like hotcakes.

The wifi and cell networks continue to struggle with the load, sometimes failing but usually somewhat usable. Apple staffers did better under load, staying quite pleasant. Some have boring jobs like using a clicker to count attendees entering each session, but they still manage to stay cheerful. I teased one clicker dude: “Don’t you have an app to do that?” He replied he did have a phone app, but that the cheap clicker was easier to use. Low tech sometimes wins.

The Apple Design Awards were noticeably different this year. They didn’t list nominees, but instead just announced each winner. That takes some of the fun out of it, in my humble opinion. More significantly, all the awards were for iPhone or iPad apps — nothing for Mac OS X at all. A bunch of hardworking iPhone developers took home beautiful cubes with a glowing Apple logo and a bunch of hardware, and had their conference costs reimbursed.

As in past years, John Geleynse from Apple demoed each app. This is fun because some apps involve musical skill, artistic ability, game-playing reflexes, and so on. He did pretty well, but joked that the awards committee might be picking apps that he’ll find challenging. And, as in past years, I feel like I should try each of the winning apps, even though there are so many apps, so little time. Perhaps Apple could offer a package deal on the App Store: all the winning apps together, at a discount?

I’m sure the annual Stump The Experts was great [Editor’s note: yeah, it was!], but the combined siren song of email backlog and sleep backlog was too great.

By Mike Morton, Google Mac TeamGoogle engineer Mike Morton somehow finds time to blog from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco while also learning, socializing, eating, and occasionally sleeping. Read today’s entry for more.Day 2 ha…

By Mike Morton, Google Mac Team

Google engineer Mike Morton is doing his annual blogging from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. Today we get Mike’s insights on WWDC keynote day, with all the fun and reality distortion it brings.

It’s 10 PM Monday. I’ve had six hours sleep in the last 48 hours and am verging on delirium, but it’s a happy kind of delirium. I got a good dose of Reality Distortion today (“a few molecules of Steve Jobs” as one developer said as he settled in for the keynote).

Waiting for the keynote, we got to listen to music, including Satchmo’s Wonderful World, and watch on the big screen as the camera focused on various audience members. Audience folks quickly caught on to the idea that if you put an interesting message on your iPad screen, the camera would find you. The big screen showed iPads saying “This is not a PC”, a New Zealand (I think) flag, “Hi Mom!”, “Free Hugs”, and “Thank you, Steve”. There was one with a job posting for AOL, complete with a Twitter account to contact. Best of all was a set of four iPads spelling W – W – D – C, with the C taking a little extra time to get ready, and the audience cheering when it did. Perhaps presaging the mobile device emphasis of the keynote, one laptop screen just said “MACS TOO!”.

Steve walked on to the usual wild applause and camera frenzy. He looked very thin, but very happy. As he usually does, he began with numbers: the number of developers attending and how many countries they’re from (5,200 and 57) and the number of days it took to sell out the conference (8 despite the fact that “this is the biggest place we can get!”). He talked about the iPad working its magic on sales numbers, and the large numbers of iPad-native apps, as opposed to iPhone apps which work on the iPad in a compatibility mode.

You’ve probably read a lot about the keynote already, so here are some moments that stood out for me:

Steve talked about the App Store. He indirectly addressed complaints about apps being rejected or waiting for approval, listing various good reasons that apps have problems, although some in the audience thought the list of reasons provided might be incomplete.

He invited three iPhone developers up to talk about their products: NetFlix, Zynga (the Farmville folks), and Activision, whose Guitar Hero demo was slick. He wrapped up by telling us that the App Store has hit 5 billion downloads, and has paid $1 billion to developers. Carl Sagan would have been right at home with this billions and billions statistic.

Steve quickly moved to introducing iPhone 4. I was impressed by lots of things, especially the promise of apps that use the new gyroscope hardware. There’ll be some great virtual reality and augmented reality apps coming out of that. I was also intrigued by putting cellular, wifi, and other antennas into the metal around the edge of the case. I hope that’ll improve reception.

iMovie for iPhone looks cool, too, although as a cousin to Final Cut, I wish they had called it Final Tap. It could have gone to 11.

And then came the classic “One more thing”: FaceTime video calls. This is going to be huge. It’ll go viral, selling itself, because it’s so noticeable when someone is using it in public. Plus it’ll drive sales of nose-hair trimmers (note to self: invest now).

Steve showed a video of people talking with FaceTime. This included a very moving moment when a soldier saw his baby on ultrasound via FaceTime. Steve said something I’ve heard him say before: “This is one of those moments that reminds us why we do what we do”.

The keynote conspicuously lacked any mention of Mac OS X. Apple may be looking toward the “post-PC era” and even hastening it, but let’s hope they don’t forget “MACS TOO” any time soon.

For the rest of the day, sitting in darkened lecture rooms was proving too much of a challenge for my jet lag, so I left before the last session. As I walked out, I saw an attendee with a t-shirt reading: “AppKit is the new Carbon”. For the non-geek among you, Carbon is an older system that developers used to program the Mac, and AppKit is the current system. You could say this was another way of declaring “MACS TOO!”.

By Mike Morton, Google Mac TeamGoogle engineer Mike Morton is doing his annual blogging from Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. Today we get Mike’s insights on WWDC keynote day, with all the fun and reality distortion it brings.It…

By Mike Morton, Google Mac Team

As regular readers know, every year, Google engineer Mike Morton becomes intrepid reporter Mike Morton as he ventures to Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. Except for the contents of Steve Jobs’s keynote address, Apple doesn’t allow attendees to disclose the technical bits of the conference, so he writes about other important observations and details, such as flights, food, lines, and plans (successful and otherwise). Here’s the first part of Mike’s 2010 journal.

Summer is here, and that means ice cream, hay fever, swimming in the pond, and — for people who develop Apple software — the annual gathering of the faithful called the Worldwide Developer Conference, known as WWDC to everyone.

I planned a short hop from my New Hampshire home down to Boston’s Logan airport, then to San Francisco just in time to get a few hours of sleep and head to the conference on Monday. Developers want to be in line early for the Steve Jobs keynote, because… well, actually, I don’t know why. We just always do. Some want to sit up front, but good camerawork and big screens throughout the room mean you can see from anywhere.

To my amazement, one die-hard Apple developer emailed me today that he plans to skip the keynote, and instead go eat pancakes and watch the live-blogging. (I won’t name him, because I worry he’ll lose friends over this.) He’s just tired of waiting in long lines. Personally, I enjoy the line. It’s a chance to catch up with people, to see and be seen.

As I write this from my transcontinental flight, it’s about 11 PM Pacific Time, and we’re going to land around 1:15 AM. I think that’s 4:15 AM on my biological clock, which is the time I normally wake up. We’ll see how much sleep I get when I check in to the hotel.

One big discussion point this year: some Mac engineers have grumbled that Apple’s schedule of sessions seems tilted toward iPhone and iPad — and away from Mac OS X. Me, I see at least two sessions I want to attend in nearly every time slot, so I’m happy, no matter what the overall emphasis.

Time to see if I can catch some sleep before we land.

By Mike Morton, Google Mac TeamAs regular readers know, every year, Google engineer Mike Morton becomes intrepid reporter Mike Morton as he ventures to Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. Except for the contents of Steve Jobs’s key…

In the past five months, we’ve counted lines of code, given thanks in Lego, and even waxed poetic — but most importantly, we’ve been working hard on bringing Google Chrome for Mac from its initial beta to the stable channel.

Today, I’m happy to announce that Google Chrome for Mac is being promoted out of beta to our stable channel. We believe that it provides not only the stability, performance and polish that every Mac user expects, but also a seamless native Mac application experience that Mac users will feel instantly at home with.

(First dev, then beta, now stable! Many thanks to Christoph Niemann)

Just like its Windows and Linux siblings, the stable version of Chrome for Mac comes with all the goodness of one of our biggest speed improvements to date. We’ve worked to make Chrome for Mac fast, fully-featured and extensible – with access to more than 4,500 extensions in the gallery. Some of Chrome for Mac’s most-requested features are now available, including full-screen mode (just hit Command + Shift + F!), easy and powerful bookmark management, as well as the ability to synchronize not only bookmarks, but also browser preferences across computers.

For those of you already on the beta channel, you’ll be auto-updated to the stable channel soon – or, if you don’t want to wait, you can download the stable version of Chrome for Mac today. If you later decide that you’d like to return to the beta channel to experience new, experimental features and improvements, you can always find the link back to the beta channel on google.com/chrome.

Posted by Mike Smith, Product Manager, Google Chrome Team

In the past five months, we’ve counted lines of code, given thanks in Lego, and even waxed poetic — but most importantly, we’ve been working hard on bringing Google Chrome for Mac from its initial beta to the stable channel. Today, I’m happy to …