I’ve started to mess around with the Google Data APIs recently to help support my Migraine Diary iOS application. Specifically I want users to be able to export their journal entries into a Google Spreadsheet rather than just a plain CSV file. I am using the Objective-C client that Google built and have come across a number of issues or gotchas.

  • The Objective-C client is badly documented – a number of Google Data API calls have zero examples and translating REST calls into Objective-C classes is a challenge.
  • OpenAuth 2 is surprisingly easy to use
  • Google provides very little troubleshooting assistance even with their client
  • Objective-C is very new compared to the Python, .NET and Java clients

That being said, I am making progress. I’ll most likely share my finalized code to create a simple spreadsheet here so others have a jumping off point.