Friday, March 13, 2015
Apps Script Dashboard and Quotas
Apps Script developers have consistently expressed the need to monitor the health of various Apps Script services. Additionally, at every forum, event, hackathon or hangout, we have heard you express a need to know and understand the quota limits in Apps Script.
Apps Script Dashboard is born!
We heard your message loud and clear, so we started working on a dashboard for Apps Script. Today, we are launching the Google Apps Script Dashboard. This experimental dashboard can be used to monitor the health of 10 major services. It also provides a detailed view into the quota restrictions in Apps Script.
Features of the Apps Script Dashboard
- The dashboard offers a view into past and present states of 10 major Apps Script services. The past view goes back one week.
- Each Apps Script service has three states on the dashboard: Normal Service, Known Issues and Investigating.
- The Known Issues state signals that we know about the issues in that service and are working to fix them.
- Quotas are displayed for three different types of user accounts: Consumer accounts (for example @gmail.com accounts), Google Apps (free) accounts, and Google Apps for Business, EDU and Government accounts.
Interesting Facts About Quotas
Did you know that consumer accounts (for example @gmail.com accounts) have quota of 1 hour of CPU time per day for executing triggers? Imagine the extent of automation that can happen for each user with triggers. And how about 20,000 calls to any external APIs. Now that packs in a lot of 3rd party integration with the likes of Salesforce.com, Flickr, Twitter and other APIs. So, if you are thinking of building extensions in Google Apps for your product, then don’t forget to leverage the UrlFetch Service which has OAuth built-in. Event managers can create 5,000 calendar events per day and SQL aficionados get 10,000 JDBC calls a day.
Check out the Dashboard for more.
 | Saurabh Gupta profile | twitter | blog Saurabh is a Developer Programs Engineer at Google. He works closely with Google Apps Script developers to help them extend Google Apps. Over the last 10 years, he has worked in the financial services industry in different roles. His current mission is to bring automation and collaboration to Google Apps users. |
Divs positioning
So the first solution was quite obvious:
<head>
So a little trick was needed:
.Test
{
background-color: Black;
width: 1000px;
height: 250px;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
/*try with or without this: display: table;*/
}
Any ideas why?
Thursday, March 12, 2015
Help users find your app with MIME type based Chrome Web Store marketing
Note from editor: The syntax for this feature has changed since this was first posted. The posted has been edited to reflect the change.
Try to think back to when the word “viral” had only negative connotations . . . if you are a web developer trying to market your app on a minimal budget, you may not remember those dark days at all! Viral marketing is currently not just the cheapest but arguably the most effective way to spread the word about your app and to drive user adoption. Through file sharing and MIME type-filtered upsells, Google Drive integration gives apps some powerful “viral” marketing capabilities.
Users love to share files. Google Drive makes this easy for them to do, and we know from experience that they do it often. When users share or sync files that they can’t open using an installed viewer, Drive displays a link to a Chrome Web Store list of apps that can open that file type -- potentially, your app. This can be a powerful mechanism for distributing your app to the users that actually need it.
For example, let’s say someone asks me to review a project plan saved in an .mpp file. I currently don’t have a viewer to open such a file. Am I out of luck? No — help is right there for me at the bottom left of the screen:
If I click on this link, I’m redirected to a Chrome Web Store list of installable apps that have registered themselves to open .mpp files. Currently, this includes some excellent options for Drive-integrated project management web apps:
Interested in getting your app in a list like this? It’s not difficult. First, add a special web intent to your Chrome Web Store manifest. This intent should include the MIME types and extensions youd like your app to be searchable by. Though the type field accepts only MIME types, it allows you to model file extensions as the special type application/vnd.google.drive.ext-type.<EXTENSION>.
{
"name" : "ProjectManagmentApp",
"version" : "1",
"description" : "A web app to manage projects",
"container" : "GOOGLE_DRIVE",
"api_console_project_id" : "1234567891011",
"gdrive_mime_types": {
"http://drive.google.com/intents/opendrivedoc": [
{
"type": ["application/vnd.ms-project",
"application/vnd.google.drive.ext-type.mpp"],
"href": "http://projectapp_web_url/",
"title" : "Open",
"disposition" : "window"
}
]
},
...
Once an intent like this is published in your app listing, you’ll be featured in Chrome Web Store “upsell” lists like the one depicted above, and users viewing the list will be a click away from installing your app. For full detail on adding this web intent to your manifest and testing it for your Chrome Web Store listing, see Help Users Find your App in the Drive SDK documentation.
We recommend that any and all listed apps should list their MIME types for filtering in this way. However, doing so is especially beneficial for apps that can open any of these following types, for which there is currently no registered viewer at all:
message/rfc822-- Emailtext/x-vcard-- Electronic business cardsapplication/x-font-ttf-- Fontsimage/gif-- Animated GIFs
Inevitably, users who lack valid viewers will end up with shared files of these MIME types. And just when they are about to throw up their hands, they’ll find your app at the top of the list of apps that can help them open the file. This creates the conditions for a very positive first user experience for your app.
If you have questions or comments about how to add this feature to your app, don’t hesitate to let us know on our Stack Overflow tag, google-drive-sdk.
 | Eric Gilmore Eric is a technical writer working with the Developer Relations group. Previously dedicated to Google Apps APIs, he is now busy writing about all aspects of the Google Drive SDK. |
Parsing exported mailboxes using Python
Google Apps domain administrators can use the Email Audit API to download mailbox accounts for audit purposes in accordance with the Customer Agreement. To improve the security of the data retrieved, the service creates a PGP-encrypted copy of the mailbox which can only be decrypted by providing the corresponding RSA key.
When decrypted, the exported mailbox will be in mbox format, a standard file format used to represent collections of email messages. The mbox format is supported by many email clients, including Mozilla Thunderbird and Eudora.
If you don’t want to install a specific email client to check the content of exported mailboxes, or if you are interested in automating this process and integrating it with your business logic, you can also programmatically access mbox files.
You could fairly easily write a parser for the simple, text-based mbox format. However, some programming languages have native mbox support or libraries which provide a higher-level interface. For example, Python has a module called mailbox that exposes such functionality, and parsing a mailbox with it only takes a few lines of code:
import mailbox
def print_payload(message):
# if the message is multipart, its payload is a list of messages
if message.is_multipart():
for part in message.get_payload():
print_payload(part)
else:
print message.get_payload(decode=True)
mbox = mailbox.mbox(export.mbox)
for message in mbox:
print message[subject]
print_payload(message)
Let me know your favorite way to parse mbox-formatted files by commenting on Google+.
For any questions related to the Email Audit API, please get in touch with us on the Google Apps Domain Info and Management APIs forum.
 | Claudio Cherubino profile | twitter | blog Claudio is a Developer Programs Engineer working on Google Apps APIs and the Google Apps Marketplace. Prior to Google, he worked as software developer, technology evangelist, community manager, consultant, technical translator and has contributed to many open-source projects, including MySQL, PHP, Wordpress, Songbird and Project Voldemort. |
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
Improved Customer Engagement Discovery in the Google Apps Marketplace
We recently updated the Google Apps Marketplace with several new features to help developers better engage with their customers and improve discoverability of apps in the marketplace.
Reply to Comments & Reviews
It’s no secret that engaging your customers and responding to their feedback is critical to success. It’s now possible to engage in conversations with customers based on comments & reviews for your app in the marketplace.
Rich Application Snippets in Google Search
Google Search recently introduced rich snippets for applications several months ago with enhanced search results for applications from marketplaces like Android Market and others. Marketplace apps will soon be appearing as rich snippets with ratings and pricing details.
New Category Home Pages
Lastly, we introduced new home pages for each category in the Marketplace to feature the top installed and newest apps for that category.
We hope that you find value in these changes and wish everyone a happy new year!
 | Steven Bazyl profile | twitter | events Steve is a Developer Advocate for Google Apps and the Google Apps Marketplace. He enjoys helping developers find ways to integrate their apps and bring added value to users. |