Google Glass is going to change our lives, or so says Google. It’s latest marketing campaign seems to indicate as much, but what about everyday use of Glass that doesn’t involve flying in jets or skydiving? What about the normal apps we use on our smartphones? How will those translate to Glass?

The Google Glass team hosted a developer panel at SXSW Interactive where they showed off a variety of third party apps for the platform. This is the first time that Google has shown anything beyond in-house software for the device, and the results are promising.

To prevent any unwanted notifications or annoying interruptions that would seem inherent to wearable computing, Google is putting strict guidelines into place for app developers. The four main rules are “design for glass,” “don’t get in the way,” “keep it timely,” and “avoid the unexpected.” These four rules will hopefully ensure that Glass never becomes a nuisance.

Sticking to these design principles, The New York Times app really seems to embrace what Glass can bring to consumers. First and foremost, the app can deliver hourly breaking news updates to your peripheral vision, but only if you want it to. To view news manually, you just have to use the “look up” head gesture to have a stream of images and headlines delivered to Glass.

Other third party app developers include Path and Evernote. Both of which allow you to share images with people right from Glass while also receiving notifications when friends upload photos to each respective service.

As for Google’s own services, the company showed off how Gmail will work on Glass. For starters, users can reply to emails using Glass’ built in microphone. The app can also be configured to only deliver emails marked as important to Glass so that your peripheral vision is not always bombarded with each and every email sent your way.

Here’s a video taken at the talk showcasing how Gmail works on Glass:

Other developers will be able to start developing for Glass later this year when the Mirror API is released. Google will probably be holding more hackathons for Glass as well in the near future, and maybe the next one won’t be exclusive to those who preordered the hardware at least year’s Google I/O.

[h/t: The Verge]