While I may not be the biggest fan of Google Desktop, I'm still quite happy with their other services, including Gmail and Google Calendar. I'm also glad to see Google's continuing efforts to provide integration solutions like the GData API, which is based on the Atom Publishing Protocol and is available in a variety of languages, including Java and C#.

Imagine my delight when I found out that Google has now released the Data APIs in Objective-C, just for us Mac users. As you may or may not know, Objective-C (based on C, loosely related to C++, and called ObjC for short) is the language of choice for most Mac applications, including Google's own Mac releases. Thus, Google's programmers needed a way to get to various Google offerings from inside an ObjC framework, and the ObjC Library was born. It's a pretty nifty tool, too. It currently supports Google Base, Spreadsheets, Calendar, and Notebook, in addition to generic Atom feeds (like Blogger). The tool also supports something called key-value coding, which will let developers access external data via strings in order to easily create Cocoa user interfaces that are integrated with the Data APIs. Confused? Me too.