Fusion Tables is neat. Google describes it as ‘an experimental data visualization web application to gather, visualize, and share larger data tables’. Last year I tried out their API which was mostly based on sending SQL statements to create and manipulate tables. Recently, I looked at Fusion Tables again as part of an imminent upgrade to Mobile Logger. The API has been upgraded to “v1”, is now much more RESTful and enforces OAuth 2.0 authentication.
Once again, fired up Titanium Appcelerator to dig into the Mobile Logger source code. Every time I look at Appcerelator I’m reminded why I have opted to focus on Objective-C. Not going to get into a religious war…it just feels cumbersome. That could just as easily be attributed to my general unfamiliarity with the Titanium Studio and toolchain, since I’m otherwise using Xcode and Objective-C daily. Still, it’s much better now than when I first started Mobile Logger in 2009—using vim because Titanium did not have an IDE (or documentation, for that matter).
Back to Fusion Tables…it’s fairly easy to create a new table and import all the data from logs. Two authenticated calls: one to create the table and receive it’s ID, and another to use that ID with CSV data in a batch import. Once in Google Drive it’s trivial to map the data and play in various ways to chart the data. Nothing special, but here is a quick result from a walk in the park.
For now, I’ve only gotten a one way trip going. Haven’t tried to reconcile changes bidirectionally, or enabled updates to existing tables…but it seems like a promising start. Beta testing the next release of Mobile Logger now. Release likely just after the new year when iTunes Connect reopens. In the meantime, the code is up on github.
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