#2cloud

We’ve had a busy *checks* three months (sorry!) and so haven't had too much time to work on new software (or, evidently, write posts here).

Here's what has gone down:

App Engine shut off its OAuth1 support. Which means we had to roll out an update for 2cloud to move it to OAuth2. That update is pending right now, and should be out tomorrow. Whee!

We wrote about our horrible track record on shipping. TL;DR: if we don't have at least a prototype of Ducky by 1/1/16, we're going to refocus our efforts on actually maintaining 2cloud, and reexamine our plans for Ducky. Which I, personally, have no desire to do. So here's to hoping that we can have a functioning prototype of Ducky in the next 7 weeks. It doesn't have to be pretty, but it does have to work.

I live in Washington now! That's pretty cool, right?

Because I live in Washington now, that means Second Bit has to become a Washington LLC. And because the jerks that own secondbit.com want thousands of dollars for it, I'm taking this opportunity to rebrand. Second Bit is about to become Impractical Labs, LLC. There's a story there, and maybe I'll tell it some day. Not today.

One of the complaints we heard longest and loudest from users of 2cloud was that the authentication flow was terrible. That's because it was. It was a hack: browser redirects leading you through an OAuth 1.0a dance, because that's the only option App Engine gave us.

We've been working on the 2cloud server stuff for a while now, and left the authentication as OpenID for all this time. It was all we needed to test the service out, and we reasoned that we'd come back and add in whatever we needed to support Android later. We never planned on leading users through a crappy, hacked-together browser flow, but we didn't know what server-side code was required to use the tokens returned by Android's AccountManager—the built-in list of accounts you've added to your device.

Tonight I took the time to find out, and have successfully implemented a test application that will retrieve a Google account token from your device and send it to our server, which will match it up with your account, create an account, or report an invalid token. There's a lot to be done on it still, but it's a very strong foundation to build on. Logging in to your device will be as simple as selecting the Google account you want to use from a list.

I worked hard to make sure your Google account would be matched across both OpenID and OAuth2 authentication schemes. The same Google account gets you credentials for the same 2cloud account.

I also laid the groundwork for future authentication mechanisms. There doesn't seem to be a good reason that you can't, for example, use your Facebook account to log in. Or your Twitter account. Or even your custom OpenID endpoint.

I may have to just start ignoring all the good press 2cloud gets. There's just too much of it to celebrate each and every one.