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Karma: A Way to Keep Wavers In Line?

In Link on 2010-02-04 by Joshua Tagged: , ,

Here’s a neat lit­tle gadget/bot combo that could prove very use­ful for pub­lic waves if the sys­tem caught on.

Add the Karma Gad­get and Bot to your waves and use it to rate your users (out of five stars). If users get con­sis­tently low scores, they will be auto­mat­i­cally kicked from Waves that choose to turn on this option.

Karma Rating Gadget

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Read a Wave in a Fast, Simple Interface

In Post on 2010-01-31 by Joshua Tagged: , , , , , ,

Want to share a pub­lic wave with some­one who hasn’t jumped on the Wave band­wagon? Need to pub­lish a Wave in a way that keeps it safe from edi­tors and wanna-be trolls? How ’bout this Wave Reader that takes a wave and dis­plays it as a web page with­out the reader need­ing an account.

wavereader.png

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Restore a Wave to a former state, or make it Read-Only.

In Post on 2010-01-23 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

In the first major update to the Google Wave client in what feels like ages, the Wave team have imple­mented two new fea­tures that will make a big dif­fer­ence in man­ag­ing your waves. The first fixes one of the most shock­ing things about the first release: that any­one you invited could come along and edit any part of your wave. Of course the point of Wave is col­lab­o­ra­tion, but some­times it was con­ceiv­able that you might not like any­one to be able to hack away at a wave, par­tic­u­larly once a wave was made pub­lic. Many good use­ful waves were effec­tively destroyed by grant­ing the pub­lic edit­ing rights.

the read-only tool in action
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Group Waves

In Link on 2009-12-09 by Joshua Tagged: , ,

Google has just unveiled their plans for group waves. The Google Wave Blog out­lines the steps to set up a Google Group (yes, you have to use another tool) then add the group as a con­tact in Google Wave.

The ser­vice does not yet allow you to add users by their googlewave.com account (gmail.com only), and the per­mis­sions can only be han­dled through the Google Groups inter­face. It also seems that to avoid spam (being able to send mes­sages to an every­one in a pub­lic group at once) users must pro-actively seek out the group wave and fol­low it to move it to their inbox [cur­rently wait­ing for con­fir­ma­tion of this].

Like any Wave fea­ture, this is still being devel­oped and its behav­iour could change over time. The Wave team have said they will con­tinue to enhance the groups fea­ture to make groups eas­ier to navigate.

Wav­ing with groups — Google Wave Blog.

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Google Wave and University

In Post on 2009-12-06 by Elle Tagged: , ,

Café Area Saltire Centre Glasgow Caledonian University

While attempt­ing to com­plete my first group assign­ment as an exter­nal stu­dent at Uni­ver­sity, I realised how much harder it was than while I was an inter­nal stu­dent.  If you’re an inter­nal stu­dent you see each other at least once a week,  mak­ing it hard to ignore the fact you have an upcom­ing assign­ment. Also you actu­ally get to meet and talk with peo­ple and elect  to be in their group (if the group selec­tion process is left to the stu­dents). Being exter­nal, I had to post a ran­dom post on the dis­cus­sion board and hope I was choos­ing the right peo­ple. And then hope they didn’t ignore my emails or wait a month or so to reply.

Google Wave would have been one of the best tools for this group assign­ment. Email meant a group of four peo­ple were all indi­vid­u­ally email­ing each other and also at times email­ing all four of the group. I ended up with snap­shots of what was hap­pen­ing, who was hav­ing what role, and what the plan was. With Google Wave, all the com­mu­ni­ca­tion would have been in one Wave, or even mul­ti­ple, but it would have been avail­able for the group to read and to add and edit. The plan of the assign­ment, of who was writ­ing what, and how we were writ­ing it could have been kept at the top of the wave, and edited as needed. The parts assigned to indi­vid­u­als could have been put in the wave and the group could know exactly where the assign­ment was up to, and edit other’s parts as we went.

The two main fea­tures of Google Wave which would have pos­i­tive affects on a uni­ver­sity group assign­ment, would have been the real time edit­ing and the abil­ity to high­light. Real time made it more like con­ver­sa­tion, with­out hav­ing to wait for emails to be sent, or hav­ing to work out who could pos­si­ble meet in the City to catch up. High­light­ing would allow those edits to be promi­nent or for indi­vid­u­als to rein­force any point they needed to make.

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Google Wave Checker Extension for Chrome

In Link on 2009-12-05 by Joshua Tagged: , ,

If like me you find Chrome gives you the most sta­ble, enjoy­able expe­ri­ence of Google Wave, you might also be pin­ing for the noti­fier exten­sion Fire­fox users get.

Well now Chrome has a neat lit­tle exten­sion that does the same thing. Jeremy Selier has built a neat lit­tle plu­gin that shows you how many unread waves you have in your inbox. It checks every thirty min­utes by default (at the request of the Wave team), but you can set it to check more fre­quently in the exten­sion options.

googlechromenotifier.PNG

Some­thing that makes a sound, or pops up a noti­fi­ca­tion box (Growl-style) would be even more use­ful in some cir­cum­stances (Fire­fox is still my main browser of choice). How­ever, if you need a sim­ple way to see new Wave activ­ity with­out check­ing the win­dow every cou­ple of min­utes, this might just be the thing.

Chrome Exten­sion — Google Wave Checker

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Installed Tweetboard. Hoping t…

In Status on 2009-11-18 by Joshua

Installed Tweet­board. Hop­ing to encour­age some twee­t­er­ing. http://po.st/oTb

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Gadget. A fun one

In Post on 2009-11-15 by Cathie Tagged: , , ,

Now I’m rather pleased that I can get myself around Wave, post links to my pho­tos and gen­er­ally do all the good stuff.

There are how­ever, peo­ple of my acquain­tance who are a lot more tech­no­log­i­cally ‘ept’ (it should be a word, you know —  the oppo­site of inept) and have started muck­ing about under the bon­net of Wave.

One of these is Dave, and the other day he intro­duced me to a lit­tle gad­get he calls 5×5.  The object of the game is to totally fill the grid with black squares. Click­ing on a square results in that square (and those around it as seen in the ini­tial pat­tern below) tog­gling its colour. There is a solu­tion in 14 moves.

DavePs 5x5

DaveP’s 5×5

I’ll hand over to Dave to explain what it is, how it came about,  and how it works.

5×5 is a puz­zle I first saw as a DOS PC thing back in the late 1980s. I wrote my own ver­sion of it back then (just for fun) and, ever since, it’s sort of been my “try a new envi­ron­ment” project. I’ve writ­ten ver­sions for DOS, Win­dows, OS/2, the old Palm Pilot and even for GNU emacs.

Some time back I quickly wrote a HTML/Javascript ver­sion so, given that that’s pretty much all a Wave gad­get is, I reworked it as a gad­get. The main dif­fer­ence with this ver­sion is that it’s coded with the state of the game held in the Wave. This means that a) you can always come back to it and it’ll be how you left it and b) every­one who is part of the Wave can see what’s hap­pen­ing and can also make moves.

All you have to do is use the “add a gad­get” tool­bar but­ton (the one that looks like a green jig­saw) and just input this URL in the dia­log that you get: http://serenity.davep.org/5x5/5x5.xml

Hmm — the fun stuff begins!

Oh, and PS … I couldn’t do the puz­zle (/grin) not even using Wave’s fab­u­lous “play­back” feature!

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Get a Google Wave invite in ha…

In Status on 2009-11-15 by Joshua

Get a Google Wave invite in half an hour. Leave a com­ment on a post at http://firstwaves.org and get your invite tonight!

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Wave Invite Turn Around Time down to Thirty Minutes

In Post on 2009-11-15 by Joshua Tagged:

I just nom­i­nated some­one for a Wave account and they received it within thirty min­utes. That and the num­ber of invites I last received (30) lead me to think that Wave accounts are no longer the hard-to-get com­mod­ity they once were.

Oh well, no more $100 invites on eBay.