Ok, so this might not seem like something easy to do, and a little bizarre. But I would absolutely love it if you could get writeroom to save to a Google Doc. You can save/read using Google's GData API (using cURL).
The reason I'm such a fan of this is that I love to write in writeroom. But many of the tools we use (including the ones we wrote) are able to integrate with Docs. So for instance I'm working on video script right now and ideally I would like to save the file under the project in torch. But because torch only integrates with docs, I can either work in google docs OR work in writeroom and save at the end and upload the file.
I don't know about others, but as more stuff moves to the cloud it's becoming harder and harder to use desktop tools. This seems like a way to be in the cloud without being in the cloud.
Copyright © 2008 Jesse Grosjean. All rights reserved.
jesse - June 16, 2008 11:22 AM
This is actually something that I'm very interested in for both WriteRoom and TaskPaper. It's not something that I'm going to have a chance to work on until after TaskPaper 2.0 is released. But once that's done this is likely to be the next big feature that I tackle. I don't want to make any promises on when, everything tends to take me at least 10 times longer then I think. But yeah, a way to get WriteRoom and TaskPaper documents into the cloud is high on my list. Especially with that little iPhone thing getting popular.
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Ben Smith - June 16, 2008 12:43 PM
Hey thanks for the quick response. Speaking of the iPhone, I have a bit of code I'm working on right now for an iPhone native version of my web apps that communicates with Google Docs. I'm not ready to share (at the moment it's messy), but when it comes time for you to write this, if you want to take a look I'd be happy to e-mail you the bit that talks to google. At a minimum it will show you how to do the whole authentication thing and it does upload and save docs as well as retrieve them.
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jesse - June 16, 2008 2:14 PM
Do you know about the google data api's, they provide an objective-c framework that I think allows adding google docs.
I haven't tried it, so the code may still be a bit complex, but probably easier then writing it yourself. Also I'm not quite sure if I'll try to synch with google docs or with my own web app. My current thinking is that I'll build a simple web app on the google app engine and use that app as the "cloud"... logic is:
This is still up in the air at the moment, but that's my current thinking... with all that said, I'd still love to see any google docs code you can share :)
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Ben Smith - June 16, 2008 5:38 PM
Yes, I'm aware of Google's framework. However, in my particular case when I used it I found that it used too much resources when I did tests under instruments. But I'm developing for the iPhone so I'm a lot more concerned about that than you probably should be. That's how I stated down the path of writing it myself (also at that point I had already written the web integration with my own PHP objects, so I was already familiar with the "Google Language", so it wasn't that big of deal).
If I might try to convince you to reconsider on Google docs. I can understand the added flexibility. However, one big benefit you will lose is all of those applications that integrate with Gdocs. Of course I'm saying this for selfish reasons, but I think a "in the cloud" WR will be substantially less useful for a lot of people, when there isn't already a library of applications integrating with it on the other side.
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jesse - June 16, 2008 6:12 PM
It's a little complicated by the fact that it's actually TaskPaper that I'm thinking about "clouding" first. And TaskPaper files would really benefit from a custom website site (like taskodone.com) that knows how to parse and display them.
Once things are in place though it probably wouldn't be too hard to support both in the end. And with that said I've probably already said to much :) This whole saving/synching to a website is something that I'm looking into now, but it's still a long way from being implemented. And a lot can happen between now and then, so I don't want anyone to get the idea that this is a promised feature for my apps. Best case it's still quite far away.
Do you know any other apps that integrate with google docs? I haven't really looked into it, but would love to know about others if they exist.
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Ben Smith - June 16, 2008 9:44 PM
Off the top of my head:
Others (mostly smaller products): http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Docs-Data...
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