Behind the Scenes: How does Streamified Update?

Updating your streams is one of the most deceptively complex, yet also the most common task that Streamified performs. It look a little different depending on what client you’re using (such as iOS app vs. our web app), but the basic steps are always the same. It’s Zane here to take you through these steps; hopefully by the end, you’ll better understand what’s going on underneath the hood.

1. Streamified Polls the Server

When this is happening, you’ll see some sort of loading indicator. In the iOS app, it appears in the title bar (next to the system clock). In the Android and web app, it appears in the brown header bar.

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Google Plus and Streamified: “Why Can’t I…?”

We’ve discussed before, here, that Google Plus has not fully released their APIs to developers yet. Put simply, an API is what lets two pieces of software talk to each other. And because Google’s APIs are so limited, Streamified is currently unable to do simple tasks like post to your Google Plus account or view your account’s circles, etc.

The Upcoming G+ Integration

Recently, we were given hope that Streamified would soon be able to “play with” Google Plus, when Google announced their “pages API.” Unfortunately, though the pages API has been live for several months now, access to it is still limited. Google requires that developers (like us) fill out a request form in order to gain access.

The sad part is, they seem to only be accepting a small number of applicants, and they are basing their acceptance upon what “clients” we represent. In other words, Google asked us “who uses your app?” Unfortunately, our own privacy policy prevents us from collecting data about you, the user, so we couldn’t tell them! The only way for us to comply with Google’s request would be to request information from you about who you are and who you represent… and we simply don’t want to do that. We believe that you should be able to use Streamified without submitting any such information.

To make matters even worse, Google “throttles” the amount of API calls we can make per day. In other words, we can only update a limited number of times per day. This cap is applied to ALL of Streamified, not just to individual users… so all users are competing for the same cap!

Our Workarounds 

As many of you may know, we have a browser extension. This browser extension actually injects your Streamified streams directly into http://plus.google.com, meaning you’re able to use Streamified while interacting with your Google Plus feeds, creating the illusion that Google Plus is working smoothly with Streamified.

On the Android, we have another trick up our sleeve: on the share page, you can press a button to launch the Google Plus app’s “share content” window. Again, this creates the illusion of G+ support.

In both of these cases, we’ve done our best to support Google Plus in the interim while we wait for Google to allow us access to the new pages API. We’re just as exasperated as you are with the delays in this process, and hope that they will do so soon!

On the Smoothness of Android

In this post, developer Zane Claes shares a little insight regarding the trials of developing for the Android platform. Read on for more about some of the choices that needed to be made in order to improve on our last beta. Fortunately, with some of the changes that are detailed in the below blog post, we’ve been able to release and distribute Android build 1.0.2 to our beta testers, bringing us closer to an official Android release.

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It’s tough to write a word about Android, especially as a mobile developer, without being drawn into a debate of Android vs. iOS. I love both, but I do have to start this post with one revelation, simply because it was a surprise to me…

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How Different Social Networks Are Used (With Graphs!)

Because our application combines so many different social networks, we have some unusual insight into exactly how users choose to interact with different networks. I was a bit curious about this, so I (Zane Claes, lead programmer for Streamified Inc.) whipped up a web dashboard in our new API that shows the usage of the networks in graph format.

About this data
This data is collected from many thousands of users on different platforms (including, for example, our web app, iOS app, desktop app, etc.) Although our “v2 API” (built on Node.js and MongoDB) is only a few weeks old, and thus this data is relatively recent, it appears to be largely consistent with the activity I saw in the v1 API (collected from ~300k users over 1 year). Finally, I would like to make it perfectly clear that no sensitive data has ever been recorded by our servers. We keep track of the usage of our application, but I could not even tell you the most basic information about when/what was posted/liked/etc.

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Looking Forward: More Speed, Syncing with Usernames, Better Notifications

We’ve been quiet lately; there’s been a lot to work on behind the scenes! Here’s a post from our lead programmer, Zane Claes, about some new back-end technical improvements that will be coming soon. These improvements will improve the user experience for the mobile app and, soon afterwards, the browser extension, and will also pave the way to our eventual Android app in the near future. Without further ado—

We’ve had something big in the works now: our new API.

If that sounds a bit mysterious, I’ll try to explain what it means here. Think of the API like the man-behind-the-curtain who pulls the string of Streamified. When you want to get a new stream, post an update, etc. then your Streamified app is connecting to our API.

So what’s so great about the new API, and why did we need it? First, our old API was built on antiquated technologies and was a bit slow. More than just speed, the new API lets us do some really cool things that we could not do before.

Instead of explaining, though, it will probably be easier to show. This is the latest beta version of the iOS app, which I am currently working on. When you first launch Streamified, you’ll now be required to choose a username.

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