National API week

Digg

There have been attempts at figuring out the usage of the still-unreleased Digg API. However, Digg are yet to release their official API.

The staff at Digg were very kind in letting certain people have a play with the API before its release, and it’s looking to be, to put it bluntly, quite excellent. A lot of Digg plugins and services are going to be either made obsolete, or very happy with all the new possibilities that will be… well, possible!¹

For example, Lorelle talks about keeping track of your Dugg posts by subscribing to the search results RSS. This is only possible if you search for the past 7 or 30 days, and it doesn’t give you much information about the status, comments or diggs received on your posts. With the Digg API, this’ll be figuratively (because too many people use the word ‘literally’ figuratively) a breeze.

API’s are important, because they give people the opportunity to extend and use an application or service in a way that they like. A world without API is like Xcode without Cocoa or Carbon, or like the Mac without Applescript. An API helps to let the user do what they like, and it’s fun!

So web developers, start your engines for the Digg API…

Google & Cocoa

It may be API week or something, because Google have also conjured up an open source API for Mac developers to use Google data. The Google Data APIs Objective-C Library is a framework² that enables the use of Google data API’s within Objective C.

Greg Robbins posted some examples of this API at the Google Mac blog. Currently you can work with Google Calendar, Google Base, Google Spreadsheets and access to more services is in development. It seems to be a very nice framework, and I’m looking forward to seeing third party use of this.

That seems to round off API week. Any thoughts?