For the last two months on and off I’ve been developing the Guardian’s Glassware in conjunction with my colleague Lindsey Dew.

Dealing with secret-pre-alpha hardware has at times being interesting but the actual process of writing services using the Mirror API is actually pretty straight-forward.

Glass applications are divided into native, using the Glass SDK, and service-based Glassware using Mirror. Mirror is built on web-friendly technologies such as HTTP, JSON and OAuth2. It also follows the Google patterns for APIs so things like authentication, discovery and the client libraries are all as you would expect if you’ve used a modern Google API before.

For our project, which was focussed on trying to create a sensible, useful newsfeed to Glass, we went with Mirror. If you want to do things like geolocation or picture and video upload then you’ll want to go native.

For various reasons we had a very narrow initial window for development. Essentially we had to start and finish in May. Our prototyping was done with a sample app from Google (you can use Mirror without an actual device), the Mirror playground and a lot of imagination.

When we actually got our Glass devices it took about a week to get my head round what the usecase was. I was thinking that it was like a very lightweight mobile phone but it is much more pervasive with lots of light contact points. I realised that we could be more aggressive about pushing information out and could go for larger sets of stories (although that was dialled back a bit in the final app to emphasise editorial curated content).

Given the tight, fixed deadline for an unknown product the rest of the application was build using lots of known elements. We used a lot of the standard Glass card templates. We used Python on Google App Engine to simplify the integration service and because we had been building a number of apps on that same stack. The application has a few concerns:

• performing Google Authentication flow
• polling the Guardian’s Content API and our internal Notification platform
• writing content to Mirror
• handling webhook callbacks from Mirror
• storing a user’s saved stories

We use Content API all the time and normally we are rendering it into widgets or pages but here we are just transforming JSON into JSON.

The cards are actually rendered by our application and the rendered content is packaged into the JSON along with a text representation. However rendering according to the public Glass stylesheet and the actual device differed, and therefore checking the actual output was important.

The webhooks are probably best handled using deferred tasks so that you are handing off the processing quickly and limiting the concern to just processing the webhook’s payload.

For the most part the application is a mix of Google stock API code and some cron tasks that reads a web API and writes to one.

Keeping the core simple meant it was possible to iterate on things like the content mix and user interactions. The need to verify everything in device served as a limiting factor.

Glass is a super divisive technology, people are very agitated when they see you wearing it. No-one seems to have an indifferent opinion about them.

Google have done a number of really interesting things with Glass that are worth considering from a technology point of view even if you feel concerned about privacy and privilege.

Firstly the miniaturisation is amazing. The Glass hardware is about the size of a highlighter and packs a camera, memory, voice synth, wifi and bluetooth. The screen is amazingly vivid and records and plays video well. It has a web browser that seems really capable of standard HTML rendering.

The vocal recognition and command menus are really interesting and you feel a little bit space age when you fire off a Google query and get the information you’re looking for read back to you in seconds.

Developing with the Mirror API is really interesting because it solves the Android fragmentation issue. My application talks to Mirror, not to the native device. If Google want to change the firmware, wire protocol or security they can without worrying about how it will affect the apps. If they do have to make breaking changes then can use the standard webapi versioning they already use.

Unlike most of the Guardian projects this one has been embargoed before the UK launch but it is great to see it out in the open. Glass might not be the ultimate wearable tech answer; just as the brick phones didn’t directly point to the iPhone. Glass is a bold device and making the Guardian’s journalism available on a new platform has been an interesting test of our development processes and an interesting challenge to the idea of what web-capable devices are (just as the Pixel exposed some flaky thinking about what a touch device is).

What will be interesting from here is how journalists will use Glass. Our project didn’t touch on how you can use Glass to share content from the scene, but the Glass has powerful capabilities to capture pictures and video hands-free and deliver it back to desk editors. There’s already a few trials planned in less stressful feature pieces and it will be interesting to see if people find the interface intuitive and more convenient that firing up their phone.