A few days ago, I wrote a blog post about My First Google Glass App in PHP. Since then, I've continued to enhance it, talk with people who have been testing it, and offer suggestions to others trying to get started. Here are some of things I've been telling people.

The first place to start changing code is in index.php. What I did was I read through the various operations to send cards to the timeline. I started making a few changes here and there, and then started getting bolder in my changes. One important tip, especially if you're developing code and sending lots of test cards to your timeline. Add the DELETE action to each card so you can delete them when your testing is over.

$menu_item = new Google_MenuItem();
$menu_item->setAction("DELETE");
array_push($menu_items, $menu_item);
$new_timeline_item->setMenuItems($menu_items);

While you're at it, you may want to add functionality to PIN or UNPIN a timeline item. This is the same as the above code for adding the DELETE action, but use use TOGGLE_PINNED. (It took me a little while to find the action.

Another minor glitch in the sample PHP code. It makes reference to $service_base_url. But that isn't set anywhere. You should change it to $base_url or set $service_base_url = $base_url. If you do this, some of the images start working.

An issue that another person ran into is that the code is written to use SQLite2. If you have SQLite3 but not SQLite2, the PHP code doesn't work. Fortunately, I have both. There is a comment on the SQLite3 page that talks about how to migrate from SQLite2 to SQLite3. I haven't tried that, because I wanted to migrate to MySQL.

Another thing to keep in mind: If you have different projects, make sure that you set up the config.php to point to different databases for each project, otherwise, you can run into various issues with the credentials.

One person asked about how to make bundled cards. I didn't find any good documentation about this, so I hacked around until I figured it out. To add bundled cards to a timeline item you need to use the setHtmlPages method, passing it an array of strings containing HTML. e.g.

$new_timeline_item->setHtmlPages($html_pages);

To get a good idea at the possible html code, take a look at the Google Mirror API Playground. It has lots of good examples, and I used this to tweak my application.

To put a map in a timeline card, you should read the section of the location documentation, Rendering maps on timeline cards.

The next thing to look at is the util.php code. This is the code which stores credential information in the SQLite2 database. I changed the code around to use MySQL instead. There were a few error conditions that I didn't properly handle, which prevented some people from accessing the app. However, once that was fixed, I started adding the code to save decks of timeline cards. The first part of that is completed. Now, I just need to add code so people can save multiple decks, optionally share them, and retrieve them.

One person suggested that some of this would probably be better done in Drupal. I like working in Drupal and I've thought about using this as a framework for my application. However, I wanted to get past the mirror API complexity first.

To see the latest version of my app, check out Glassdeck. If you want the MySQL util.php code or have questions, contact me via Google+

More soon...