Thursday, November 19, 2009

Google Voice API Change

Just to give everyone some insight into why gDial Pro in the App Catalog is currently broken. It appears that Google Voice changed their API and since it isn't a publicly released/documented API there is no way to let 3rd party developers know in advance when they change it and its not really their responsibility at this point.

In this case they changed the method call to do a "webdial" and didn't make the new method backwards compatible, so as a result it fails for anyone who didn't move to the new API call. I was able to quickly find the issue, and repair gDial Pro, but now it is in queue for approval at Palm before being pushed to the App Catalog.

This is the real reason that we developers need a much quicker way to push our updates and changes to users. When we discover a bug, we can fix it immediately, but then the update doesn't get to our end users until it is reviewed by Palm. I know they are supposed to be releasing a way to directly get updates to our end users shortly so this should be a thing of the past in the coming months.

Paul Graham, an old LISPer, has written a post that basically echo's this same issue on Apple. Here it is for your perusal.

Apple's Mistake

Palm, please make sure to read this and listen to what he is saying as it exactly echo's how I feel and what I was saying in my past post. I know you guys are already on the path to speed up the deployment, but I just felt it important to reiterate what Paul Graham states as the reason for "karma leak" at Apple with their iPhone developers.

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