Trick or Treat [Gadget, Bot]

Trick or Treat [Gadget, Bot]

From the Google Wave Developer Blog

First, the extension installer gives you an option in your New Wave menu to “Go Trick or Treating”. When you click that, it creates a new wave and inserts a gadget (try clicking around that to see what surprises await). Then, whenever a user types ‘trick or treat’, the robot fetches an image from Google Image Search for either a yummy candy bar, or well, something not that yummy.

No one I know has ever celebrated Halloween (it’s relatively new in Australia), and I say “Bah humbug!” (wrong holiday I know). But for those of you who want to get into the spirit of it (bad pun I know), but don’t want to leave Wave, this might be for you.

Using Google Wave Some use cases for Google Wave at the Wave Help page. A quick run down of how you could potentially use Wave if you’re stuck for ideas.

Using Google Wave

Some use cases for Google Wave at the Wave Help page. A quick run down of how you could potentially use Wave if you’re stuck for ideas.

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Minor interface tweak: The default Wave avatar for new users (and bots) has been slightly updated with a bit of shading around the edges. Not a very big deal at all. Just interesting to see what things the team are tweaking.

Minor interface tweak: The default Wave avatar for new users (and bots) has been slightly updated with a bit of shading around the edges.

Not a very big deal at all. Just interesting to see what things the team are tweaking.

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Four reasons Wave has a real chance to replace email.

The Next Web attended the Google Wave GTUG (Google Technology User Group) meetup in London where Lars Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon (the two responsible for Google Wave) gave a presentation on some upcoming Google Wave APIs. James Glick from The Next Web has included a dot-point summary of the most important parts, a few of which I have included below. Read his article for even more juicy inside information.

To cut a potentially exhausting blog post short, a summary of snippets from their presentation include:

• Extension gallery to be fully up and running in months with a wider collection and sharing functionality.

• An extension store is planned where developers would be able to display and charge for apps.

• [Read the article at The Next Web for more]

• Google Wave will be able to be deployed within networks and intranets for organisations and companies to use internally.

• Although it has been requested by a substantial amount of preview users, there are no plans to intergrate Gmail or any mail with Google Wave. The APIs though, will provide developers with the ability to do it in the future…

The rest of the items on Glick’s list show Wave team is obviously committed to improving the experience for everyone. The four items I’ve included above highlight for me the potential for Wave to grow beyond the bounds of what Google can achieve and put it firmly in the hands of developers who can make it a thriving, useful tool. If Wave can ever dethrone email as the default form of communication, it will be because of these for things: The ability for developers to extend it and make money from it, for businesses to deploy their own secure versions, and for Wave to send and receive email. Although it looks like the Google team don’t have plans to bake email support in, I am confident it will not be long before such an extension is built and available.

Add characters quickly to a wave – Character Entity Bot [Google Code]

Add characters quickly to a wave – Character Entity Bot [Google Code]

Wave has a WYSIWYG interface for styling your blips. For those of us used to working on the web however, the default Bold/Italic/Dot-point tools can leave a lot to be desired. Many wont have a character pallet handy, or remember the windows/mac keyboard codes for producing various glyphs either. But if you’ve worked on the web long enough, you might be familiar with HTML/unicode character entities such as & (&) and • (•).

If you need to add various characters to your waves, and are familiar with HTML entities, then the Character Entity bot might be what you need. Add character-entity@appspot.com to your wave, and whenever you write a character (in the format &code;) the bot will happily convert the code into the correct characters for you.

Here are a few to try:

© becomes ©

↔ becomes ↔

∴ becomes ∴

(A more detailed list can be found at Intuitive Systems)

“…developers have asked us a lot for a market place where we’ll help them sell their extensions to our users including a revenue share so we’ll also make some money from it. “I’ll be very surprised if we don’t go down that route.”

“…developers have asked us a lot for a market place where we’ll help them sell their extensions to our users including a revenue share so we’ll also make some money from it.

“I’ll be very surprised if we don’t go down that route.”

Google Wave to have application store | News | TechRadar UK

This will be a very important development in the success of Wave. The iPhone has grown enormously by making high quality apps simple to pay for and receive. The key difference for Wave will be that the protocol is open for anyone to extend, and the main client (the Google Wave interface) is web based.

I predict this will mean a lot more extensions will be made open source or free. Of course it’s highly dependent on the quality and user experience of the store. If a developer can make an extension open source, but still make it available in the same marketplace many will choose to do so.

Keep in mind too, that over time other clients will emerge that will access the Wave protocol, and it will be interesting to see if the marketplace will extend to such clients.

Expecting invites to give out? This is why you might not have them – How do I invite people to try Google Wave? [Google Wave Help]

Expecting invites to give out? This is why you might not have them – How do I invite people to try Google Wave? [Google Wave Help]

One thing I’ve been wondering is how we’ll get the chance to invite more people to Wave. I was one of the lucky ones who got in on the first round, and had invites to share, but those I’ve invited haven’t been so lucky. Currently my invite counter is sitting at “00” too.

As soon as we’re confident that the system can accept more users, we will add a wave to your account that allows you to nominate friends and colleagues for an account. Once you have the capability to invite people, the wave appear in your inbox.

So we’ll be seeing this eventually (goodness knows how it’s added – magic fairy dust perhaps), so don’t fret – All in good time!

Exits are East, South: Wave Dice Gadget – Google Code

Exits are East, South: Wave Dice Gadget – Google Code

For the geeks out there (oh wait, that’s all of you) this gadget is for you.

The Wave Dice Gadget generates a dice-roll for you, and supports “standard PnP dice types”.

Go get your game on in-wave!

I use portable Firefox for browsing at work with a modified user-agent (pretending it’s Internet Explorer, of course!) and Google Wave keeps alerting me the browser is not supported. To bypass this annoying check, go directly to https://wave.google.com/wave/?nouacheck. Of course, some browsers just can’t handle the storm: in my experience so far, Opera 10 fails to load Wave every time with a nasty error.

I use portable Firefox for browsing at work with a modified user-agent (pretending it’s Internet Explorer, of course!) and Google Wave keeps alerting me the browser is not supported. To bypass this annoying check, go directly to https://wave.google.com/wave/?nouacheck. Of course, some browsers just can’t handle the storm: in my experience so far, Opera 10 fails to load Wave every time with a nasty error.

Fors: Shortcuts and searches in Google Wave.

gxg at FORS covers 3 things you should know about Wave. We’ve covered Shortcuts and useful searches already, but the information about URLs is important and useful.

One Take away from the section on searches is the reader tip published at Lifehacker regarding limiting waves to certain languages.

Learn these now! Keyboard shortcuts on Google Wave Help

Learn these now! Keyboard shortcuts on Google Wave Help

The Wave experience can quickly become frustrating as your conversations get longer. It can take a couple of mouse-clicks to reply in the middle of a blip and then again to finish the blip. If you’re constantly shifting from keyboard to mouse and back again, your productivity can quickly suffer.

But take the time to learn some of these handy shortcuts and you’ll find the interface less baffling and the usefulness of Wave will increase (I personally guarantee it!) Take Shift-Enter for example. It can be used to:

Reply to a message at the end of a wave. The new message will appear at the same indentation level, at the very end of the wave.

but it also has the:

Same function as ‘Done’ button — signifies you are finished editing your addition to a wave.
Just this one shortcut has made my experience of Wave a thousand times better. You might find something that helps you out too!