

Google Drive SDK - valhallarecords
https://developers.google.com/drive/index

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51Cards
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.

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gyom
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 !"

~~~
cpeterso
I'm disappointed. I thought the same thing.

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jrajav
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.

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timothya
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.

~~~
jrajav
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.

~~~
timothya
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.

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jrajav
> 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.

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hndl
(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).

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

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erok89
They did...

Google Drive Release: [http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/introducing-
google-dr...](http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/introducing-google-drive-
yes-really.html)

Google Drive SDK release:
[http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/04/introducing-
goo...](http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/04/introducing-google-drive-
and-google.html)

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

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malkia
Why no "C" api?

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mtgx
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.

~~~
bduerst
Was it working before it was set in offline mode?

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mtgx
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.

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

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taligent
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.

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davorak
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?

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taligent
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...](http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!categories/drive/report-
a-problem)

