December 2018 Summaries

Google announced the shutdown of its legacy Google+ APIs on March 7, 2019, following a progressive phase-out where affected API calls began failing intermittently from January 28, 2019. Despite the deprecation of Google+ Sign-in, developers are encouraged to transition to the more comprehensive Google Sign-in system. New implementations of several Google+ APIs, such as people.get and people.getOpenIdConnect, have been created to maintain basic sign-in functionality by returning essential profile fields like name and email address. While some OAuth scope requests related to Google+ data will no longer be granted, the transition allows for temporary remapping of Google+ sign-in scopes to existing Google Sign-in scopes, facilitating continued use for legacy applications until full migration. Google+ integrations for web and mobile apps are being discontinued, though Google is focusing on enhancing Google+ for enterprise organizations with new features and updates. Developers are advised to eliminate dependencies on Google+ APIs to avoid disruptions and consider alternative APIs, such as Google Sign-in and Google People API, for their applications.

The Google Home Hub, equipped with the Google Assistant, enhances kitchen productivity by allowing users to multitask using voice or touch, and has partnered with BuzzFeed's Tasty to integrate 2,000 step-by-step cooking tutorials. This collaboration allows users to search for recipes based on available ingredients, dietary restrictions, and cuisine preferences, offering instructional videos and voice guidance to navigate recipes without interrupting the cooking process. Tasty's integration with the Home Hub exemplifies how brands can combine voice and visual elements to create engaging smart home experiences, and highlights the potential for digital assistants to offer personalized, hands-free support in everyday tasks. The development of Tasty's Action focused on creating a fun, accessible, and conversational experience for chefs of all levels, and the brand is excited to explore further applications of digital assistance, anticipating more creative and innovative uses as the technology evolves.

Yarden Eitan, an iOS engineer for Google's Material Design, discusses developing the shape system for Material Design, emphasizing the importance of shapes in UI components like cards and buttons. The project aimed to provide designers with the flexibility to apply unique shapes systematically, enhancing user experience and brand expression. The engineering challenge involved ensuring consistent shape support across major platforms, particularly overcoming the lack of native solutions for cut corners on the web. The team decided to initially support square, rounded, and cut shapes, balancing flexibility with practicality. On iOS, the implementation used CALayer and CAShapeLayer classes to manage and display custom shapes, with APIs allowing developers to apply these shapes to components easily. The collaboration with design teams was crucial in approaching the problem from multiple perspectives, leading to a more comprehensive solution. The project continues to evolve, with future plans to expand shape support and potentially include cut corners on the web once technologies like Houdini are ready.

Google's ARCore and Sceneform have been updated to enhance the realism of augmented reality (AR) experiences by improving plane boundary tracking and lighting features, with the release of ARCore 1.6. Sceneform now defaults to neutral and white ambient lighting, aligning digital objects with real-world light dynamics, such as color changes during different times of the day. Additionally, the update introduces screen capture and recording capabilities, allowing developers to record demos and users to share AR interactions on social media. These enhancements are accessible on a growing number of ARCore-enabled devices, including new additions like the Samsung Galaxy A3 and Huawei P20 Lite, and aim to broaden the reach and engagement of AR applications.

Google announced the retirement of the Drive Android API, shifting focus to the Drive REST API to enhance functionality for developers. This change aims to simplify the integration of Google Drive features into applications, offering capabilities such as file sharing, collaboration, permission management, commenting, and change detection. The Drive REST API allows for seamless interaction with Drive documents, including exporting and converting Google Docs, and supports offline sync through a SyncAdapter. Developers using the Drive Android API must migrate to the REST API by December 6, 2019, with Google providing a detailed migration guide and a sample app to facilitate the transition.

On December 5, 2018, Google announced the release of version 2 of the Google Drive Activity API, which offers an expanded data model to better represent actions, actors, and targets within Google Drive activities. This new version introduces enhanced features for filtering API request results and replaces the previous version, Drive Activity API v1. Users are encouraged to migrate their applications to the updated API since the v1 API will be discontinued on December 31, 2019, rendering applications that rely on it non-functional. To facilitate the transition, Google provides a migration guide, along with an overview, additional guides, reference documentation, and an APIs Explorer for hands-on experience.

Flutter 1.0, announced at Flutter Live in December 2018, marks the first stable release of Google's UI toolkit designed to create native experiences for iOS and Android from a single codebase. Addressing the compromises of cross-platform mobile development, Flutter offers hardware-accelerated graphics and leverages the Dart platform for compiling native ARM code, enhancing both speed and productivity. Key features include stateful hot reload for real-time code iteration, an open-source ecosystem with thousands of plugins, and seamless integration with existing Android and iOS apps. Emphasizing design freedom, Flutter allows for pixel-perfect control and animation capabilities, aligning with Google's Material Design. The toolkit has quickly gained traction, with adoption by major companies like Google Ads and Capital One, and the introduction of tools like Square's payment SDKs and 2Dimensions' Flare for vector animations. Flutter's potential extends beyond mobile to desktop and web platforms, as seen in experimental projects like Hummingbird, which compiles Flutter to JavaScript for web use. The stable channel promises quarterly updates, and the thriving community continues to shape its development.