Downloader: GoogleCL: Your command line might get more love now

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

GoogleCL: Your command line might get more love now

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Productivity, Web services, Google

With all of the projects that Google's been working on lately, it's easy to forget that not everything has to have a glossy UI to function well. Sometimes a service can function more efficiently with the entire visual element stripped from it, and that's exactly what Google's allowed the geeks among us to do. Users can now interact with several of the most popular Google services via command line, and all that's required is Python and a bit of light CLI experience.

The tool to do this is called GoogleCL, and it makes good use of Google Data APIs. The whole thing runs on Python and uses the GData Python Client -- its only real dependency. If you're a beginner in CLI work, don't worry. Installing both took less than 5 minutes, and it's very straightforward.

At this time, six services can be used with GoogleCL: Blogger, Calendar, Contacts, Docs, Picasa, and YouTube. Don't think that it's just a toy, though. The power of this thing is serious business; you can post to Blogger (like in the example image above), post videos to YouTube, edit documents on Docs, or even pull entire albums from Picasa straight to your hard drive with a simple get. It really is pure function and no nonsense (unlike some other projects). [Harsh -Ed]

The first time you connect to each service, you're asked to verify in a browser that the service should allow GoogleCL to connect, but once you've granted access, an OAuth token is cached for further use. You can also set defaults, like which browser to use if you want it opened automagically, by adding that info to a config file.

Perhaps the most impressive part, though it may not sound like it at first, is the fact that you're not only able to post to Blogger or upload to YouTube and Picasa, but that you're also able to delete and edit items as well as pull them from the cloud at will. I can definitely see some nice scripts in the future that will make even better use of this.