Alieniloquent

So, I’m going to be writing an app to interface with Google Calendar, so I need to learn how to speak the Google Data APIs. The first part of this is being able to authenticate using their client login protocol.

I figured I’d throw together a simple little Cocoa app that just has text inputs for all the things that need to be sent and then I could do that. I figured once I had the code written, I could extract it out into a class that I could use in my real app.

I spent 30 minutes remembering how to throw the GUI together (I’m a bit rusty).

I spent an hour or so understanding the NSURL API and figuring out how to url encode in Cocoa (it turns out there isn’t anything in the Foundation classes).

I spent another fifteen minutes not understanding why it told me my authentication was bad, despite it being correct, and then realizing I wasn’t actually sending my authentication information (or any part of the request). It only took five minutes to fix it.

I now get a successful response back from Google when I log in using my little login testing application. How cool is that?