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Google Drive SDK

developers.google.com

This is somewhat off topic but I have found it mildly humourous lately that Google is building self driving cars but they chose "Google Drive" as the name for a completely unrelated product.

Especially given that there was a link about the self-driving cars right following that link on Google Drive.

My brain just cognitively squished the two of them together and went "whoaa ... they're opening the SDK for the car stuff already !"

I'm disappointed. I thought the same thing.

Not to mention what exactly a "drive" is! In the olden days we knew what physical thing a drive was, and DOS/Windows made sure people knew what a drive letter was. But nowadays who knows or cares. To complete this branding they should use a floppy disk logo, or maybe an Iomega Zip "drive".

Insert obligatory rant about lack of Linux client.

Most PCs still have an optical drive. Everyone I know has a couple of usb thumb drives. I don't think people are struggling with the concept of a "drive".

I see the optical drives (a very geeky name) being called "burners" instead at Dell and many people call the thumb drives "sticks". I'm not saying people don't use the "drive" terminology just that it is on its way out. Laptops have been outselling desktops for several years, and thin/light ones don't have burners. iPads have been a phenomenal success.

Many people already don't distinguish between transient (RAM) and permanent (HD/Flash) memory. (And that distinction is only something that developers should have to care about anyway.)

So while some people may be aware of drives, it will increasingly go the other way.

An optical drive is not necessarily a burner. A burner is capable of writing as well as reading. However, this is borderline irrelevant. Users still know what a CD-ROM drive is. They know what a thumb drive is. Knowing one term (usb stick) doesn't mean they don't know the other (thumb drive). People didn't forget the term "automobile" just because "car" became more popular.

As for laptops, the loss of the optical drive on thin ones is very recent, dating basically to the MacBook Air. iPads are utterly irrelevant. Have people also forgotten what keyboards and mice are since iPads started selling?

You might be right that people will eventually stop using the term drive as its currently used, but right now it's a term with plenty of recognition. And over a longer period of time, rather than the term disappearing, I see no reason why the definition wouldn't simply adapt to refer to online "drives" if physical drives truly died out.

It never occurred to me they'd call their self-driving vehicles "Google Drive". It's the one thing you don't do. Maybe Google Auto, Google Transport, Google Car, or any of a number of names.

Though, I guess there's a good argument that "Google Drive" would be what "Google" does for you... Great, now you're convincing me!

I'm betting on Google Drive Engine.

Maybe they'll call that Google Self-Drive.

They've had "DrEdit," a plain text editor, as their example Drive app for a while now. Kind of ironic, since you still can't edit plain text files in the vanilla Google Drive web app.

By the Google Drive web app I assume you mean the Google Docs editor? In which case, yeah, you can only edit Google Docs type files in their editor. That's the point of this SDK - if you want to edit other types of files, you can build an app to do so.

Well, 1) It clearly wouldn't be difficult for them to do this, or even to integrate it with the existing Docs editor. The Docs editor can already view them, in fact, so it's kind of baffling why they stopped short of editing. 2) It would be preferable for both usability and performance to have it integrated with Drive rather than as an external app. 3) The Android Drive app can already edit text files.

1) It might not be difficult, but that doesn't mean they should do it. I don't really think it's "baffling" why they wouldn't build a bunch of extra functionality that probably wouldn't be used by many people. Most people editing documents want a wysiwyg editor like Google Docs, from which they can always download the file in the plain text format. People who actually edit plain text files regularly (programmers and such) probably have a preferred editor that they use, and wouldn't really want to edit in a little <textarea>, unless you are proposing they build a more advanced text editor (I assume that's not what you mean though, you said it wouldn't be difficult).

2) Sure, but again, just because they can add a feature doesn't mean they should.

3) Interesting, I didn't know that. Maybe they are planning to add the feature after all.

Another option of course is to use the Google Drive desktop program, and edit your plain text files locally, which will be synced to your Drive.

> Another option of course is to use the Google Drive desktop program, and edit your plain text files locally, which will be synced to your Drive.

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the Google Drive desktop syncers leave quite a bit to be desired. I've used both the Mac and the Windows version. The Windows version crashes regularly, and the Mac version racks up sizable memory leaks after a few days of use. They both use more disk and CPU resources than it seems like they should need, too. At least they aren't as bad as the Google Music desktop client, though.

I'd love to see Google Drive fleshed out this way. And even if not with a video editor, at least a viewing tool for video. And a better one for images. (Though, obviously editing tools would be nice.)

Similarly, I'd like the ability to view (and download/upload) my Google Music files in a Drive style. You know, while I'm dreaming.

So I could integrate a web-based IDE into Google Docs, and commit code directly from Google Docs onto a webserver?

Awesome.

check out https://neutron-drive.appspot.com/

Sure. There are already several web-based IDEs that are integrated with Google Docs.

Is there a running demo of DrEdit? Edit there's one on the chrome appstore

(Slightly off-topic) What I feel gives Google Drive a leverage over Dropbox is the fact that it works within email. There isn't another place I need to go to share something. I just go to the place I am at and share. The people who I want to share with are already there. This works for well for both, Google's general audience as well as those SMBs that use Google mail for their work mail (read: with a domain, so it even layers a "group thing" there).

They should have released this immediately after they released Google Drive.

They did...

Google Drive Release: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/introducing-google-dr...

Google Drive SDK release: http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/04/introducing-goo...

The thing that they made available back then was for web applications only. This isn't.

Actually it was released a few months ago. The Google Apps Challenge 2012 [1] which started on June 5, is about apps built on top of it.

[1] http://www.google.com/events/gadc2012/

For the most part you could piggyback off the Google Docs API and SDKs if need be.

It likely didn't exist yet. These things take time.

Why no "C" api?

What has bothered me most about Google Drive lately, is that when I try to open an epub file from Drive, even if I make it available offline, it doesn't want to open the file in the selected book reader. Is that Google's fault or the book reader app's fault (it supports epub, obviously). This is on Android.

Was it working before it was set in offline mode?

No, it never worked. Normally when you try to open something you get that Android dialog that asks you to choose an app. And I would assume it's supposed to work like that with the stuff from inside Google Drive since it's downloading them to the phone anyway, but it doesn't work like that. It tries to open it with the app, but doesn't.

Just wondering why you specified offline mode. That is definitely the third party app problem.

It sounds like an app problem then.

Sorry but Google Drive is by far the worst out of all online storage/sync providers.

Crashes constantly for Mac users and has awful upload/download speeds. And they have made zero effort to do anything about it for over a year. You only have to look through the forum to see their commitment in general is pretty lax.

Google Drive has been out for less than half a year, not over a year. Also I've had more issues with Dropbox not syncing on Linux machines than I have with GDrive on OSX.

Really I have used it since it came out and I can not remember it crashing once. Are the crashes caused perhaps by use cases I have not run into, large file, rapid updating or something else?

Nothing out of the ordinary. And crashing is one thing but how on earth does Google have such bad download/upload speeds.

http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!categories/drive/rep...

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