Designing and Developing for Google Glass

Chapter 11. Sharing Resources with Glassware

We’ve done some exciting things with timeline items so far by using the Mirror API—creating them, adding menus to them, deleting and updating them, and replying to them, but the real power behind the Mirror API ends up being attached to contacts and being able to share things with them. We’ve mentioned a lot so far in this book about the ability to share information, and this chapter drills down into what it takes to manipulate this powerful feature in your services. The concept of sharing timeline cards that contain content in a variety of media formats created by the wearer—or even cards distributed by other Glassware—is as important as subscriptions. In fact, the latter couldn’t exist without the former!

In this chapter, we’ll take a look at the basics behind sharing, but also learn how Google’s implementation of sharing takes mobile computing a step further, making for some really interesting opportunities for your projects and the destinations your data can have. This includes both the Share menu item, as well as leveraging voice commands that are present on the main Glass menu.

The Share Menu Item

In our hypothetical chat Glassware from the last chapter, we covered replying to a message. If we think about other operations we tend to do on messages, we can see that we’re missing a forward-like command. If you looked at the list of available values for the Timeline.menuItems.action property, you’ll have noticed that SHARE hasn’t been ...