Posted by William Denniss, Product Manager, Identity and Authentication Lavanya Mahendran, Policy Advisor, Google Cloud Platform and Google APIs
Developers have created an exciting ecosystem of mobile and web applications that offer a seemingly infinite array of features and services for consumers to utilize. Today you can download applications that offer to increase your productivity at work, as well as applications that manage your daily expenses or help you meditate, and many more.
We know that our users love using these applications, and we recognize that often Google users want to share their data with these applications to personalize or enhance the experience. Google provides a rich variety of API services that developers may access, and we provide developers the ability to request permission directly from our users when they want to access various categories of user data.
The privacy and security of our users’ data is very important to us, and we’ve always expected developers to treat Google user data with transparency and concern for user choice. Among other things, this means that we’ve long expected developers to get informed consent when they request access to user data, so that users understand what data they are sharing and how it will be used.
We’re always looking for ways to make our requirements more accessible to everyone, including our end-users. To that end, we recently published expanded policy guidelines for developers who wish to access Google user data using our API services. We hope this guidance will help developers and Google users interact in a manner that is informed and overall consistent with user expectations.
Read the full Google API Services User Data policy.
We hope that developers and Google users find this policy guidance helpful. We believe that transparency around the collection and use of Google user data is necessary to ensure informed user consent, but also that it genuinely fosters a helpful and productive dialogue between developers and users that ultimately benefits the entire ecosystem. Google account users can review and manage the apps and websites connected to their Google account from the My Account page.
Posted by Pierce Vollucci, Associate Product Manager, Gmail and Steve Bazyl, Developer Programs Engineer, Google Apps
When you send emails, your recipients might read them on a computer, tablet, or phone—or more likely, all three. However your message might look different on all these devices. Later this month, you’ll be able to use CSS media queries with Gmail and Inbox by Gmail to ensure that your message is formatted the way you intended, whether it's viewed on a computer, a phone in portrait mode, or a tablet in landscape mode. You’ll be able to change styles based on width, rotation, and resolution, allowing for more responsive formatting to optimize your email for every device.
In discussions with email designers, these supported CSS rules were identified as the most useful media queries to support responsive design. This is just one part of an overall effort to expand CSS support in Gmail and to give email designers more control over how their messages are rendered. For example, the CSS below applies the color red when the screen width exceeds 500px.
@media screen and (min-width: 500px) { .colored { color:red; } }
You can find the full list of supported CSS rules in the developer documentation. We hope this reference helps you create more feature-rich, responsive email for users. Happy formatting!
Google Calendar and Google Drive for Atlassian HipChat
Guest post by Rich Manalang, Partner Engineering Lead at Atlassian. Posted by Wesley Chun, Developer Advocate, Google Apps.
Atlassian has been building collaboration software for over 14 years. With products that include JIRA, Confluence, Bitbucket, and HipChat, our organization has learned a lot about how teams work effectively.
HipChat launched the Connect API in November 2015, and since then we’ve continued to build upon our ecosystem of integrations and collaborations. A few months ago, our team looked at potential integrations that would be a perfect marriage with HipChat — and today, we’re excited to share the Google Calendar and Google Drive integration for HipChat.
Millions of people use Google’s products everyday, so we instantly knew this was the right opportunity. Many of HipChat’s customers are developers, and they told us that managing time and better access to files were two of the most important things in their day-to-day. Now with Google integrations available inside of HipChat, there’s no need to launch another browser tab or app.
By building Google Calendar directly into HipChat, we’re improving the signal-to-noise ratio on a daily basis. Before this integration, we all dealt with context-switching between apps and browser tabs. Now, customers can use HipChat to view and share various calendars, schedules and important dates in the right sidebar. Our customers spend their entire working day inside our HipChat app — unlike email, you don’t just fire it up and quit periodically. So naturally, having your calendar up-front is compelling. And what’s more, you can slice and dice which ones you see on a per-room basis. Say you’re a program manager — if you go into the Engineering HipChat “room,” you can see the Engineering and related calendars. Then, when you switch into the Marketing room, you may see different calendars depending on whom you’re collaborating with.
Having dual calendars front and center within HipChat is critical for staying on top of my work. I’m personally very excited about the Google Calendar integration because it’s one of the most important apps I use day-in and day-out. As a single parent with two kids busy at school, I need to know everything that's going on. My calendar is stacked, and I want to see it all at a glance. That urgency is similar when considering the most important documents in someone's daily workflow.
When we started working on the Google Drive integration, we wanted to focus on what was most important — accessibility, shareability, and ease of use.
There are many benefits to bringing third party integrations right into HipChat. The Google Drive integration allows teams to collaborate and work together while saving time and eliminating context switching. Being able to access documents, presentations, and files is critical whether a user is at the office or remote. It integrates nicely into the right side bar, enabling users to access, share to the room, and collaborate around important documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. We worked with third party developer Topdox, who was a tremendous partner in bringing this new feature into HipChat. We’re getting great feedback around the speed and simplicity of sharing files without ever having to leave the HipChat application.
Why would Google Developers be interested?
When we built these integrations, we wanted to give our users a nice balance between out-of-the-box usefulness but also ultimate flexibility in which calendars and accounts a user can view. To do that, we wanted one UI that can display multiple calendars from multiple Google accounts — similar to what most Calendar mobile apps do today, including Google’s own mobile Calendar app.
These new integrations were built entirely on top of Google’s API. Google’s Calendar API is a full featured API that gave us everything we needed to create a calendar experience fit for HipChat’s users. On top of that, the API was designed with efficiency in mind with push notifications for changes to resources and incremental syncing to improve performance and bandwidth use.
Building on top of Google APIs has allowed us to think of new ways to bring even tighter integrations with our products along with the myriad of add-ons built by Atlassian’s ecosystem. One idea under consideration is to link JIRA Software and Google Calendar so that all your JIRA issues are overlayed onto a Google Calendar. Then this calendar can be shared with the relevant HipChat room bringing it all together and enabling teams to get more done. We’d love to hear your feedback on this idea.
We think there are many opportunities to improve how teams work together by integrating with Google and Atlassian. You can find out more about Atlassian Connect on our developer’s site and the Google APIs on theirs.
Posted by Chris Han, Product Manager, Apps Developer Platform
For over 6 years, the Google Apps Marketplace has been the #1 destination for administrators and business users within Google Apps domains to find, discover and install third-party apps and integrations that extend what they can do with Google Apps.
We are happy to announce that over the next few weeks, we are opening up the Google Apps Marketplace to consumer end-users, and wanted to give you a heads up as well as some technical guidance should you wish to make any changes or tweaks to your app. Here is what you need to know if you are a technology partner or developer building for the Google Apps Marketplace:
First, this change only applies to apps which have opted in to “Enable Individual Install” on the Google Apps Marketplace SDK located in the Developer Console. Apps not enabled with individual install will not appear to consumers, nor will they be installable for them.
Second, as a general best practice, we recommend that you do not use a user’s email address as a unique identifier. Email addresses for both consumer and business accounts can be renamed or changed. Make sure to always use the Google Account ID. For more information on sign in and security, please read this.
If you have questions or have any feedback regarding this development, please let us know here. We look forward to exposing what you’ve built to our broader community.
Posted by Tom Holman, Product Manager, Google Sheets and Josh Danziger, Software Engineer, Google Sheets
At Google, we are always working to keep our users' information safe. As part of these ongoing efforts, we will begin requiring explicit authorization when third-party sites request access to Google Sheets content via the Google Visualization API or Google Query Language.
For many developers, this change will be transparent, but others may need to make changes in order to continue reading spreadsheet data. For more details on the technical changes required, please visit the Google Charts API Documentation. We will begin enforcing these requirements on September 14, 2016.
If you have any questions or concerns about this change, please follow up in the Google Docs forum or on Stack Overflow.
Calling all developers: try our developer preview today!
As you can see from above, Android add-ons offer a great opportunity to build innovative integrations and reach Docs and Sheets users around the world. They’re basically Android apps that connect with Google Apps Script projects on the server-side, allowing them to access and manipulate data from Google Docs or Sheets using standard Apps Script techniques. Check out our documentation which includes UI guidelines as well as sample code to get you started. We’ve also made it easy for you to publish your apps with the Apps Script editor.
Android add-ons are available today as a developer preview. We look forward to seeing what you build!
