Archive for the ‘Link’ Category

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Google Wave Births “Active Robots”

In Link on 2010-03-03 by Joshua

An amigurumi robot

In my post yes­ter­day I noted the increased push by the Wave devel­op­ers to make it eas­ier for the wave com­mu­nity to build and deploy exten­sions. It turns out this flurry of activ­ity coin­cided with the immi­nent release of Ver­sion 2 of the Wave API, announced today.

The first new fea­ture is the:

Active API: In v2, robots can now push infor­ma­tion into waves (with­out hav­ing to wait to respond to a user action). This replaces the need for our dep­re­cated cron API, as now you can update a wave when the weather changes or the stock price falls below some thresh­old. You can learn more in the Active API docs.

Google Wave Devel­oper Blog Announce­ment.

Read More »

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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

Read More »

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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 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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Wave To Posterous

In Link on 2009-11-10 by Joshua Tagged: , ,

Google fan Lookon has cre­ated a Bot to post to his Pos­ter­ous blog, and writ­ten detailed instruc­tions on how to do it.

It’s straight for­ward enough, add the bot and log in to the form it gives you. The next time you add the bot to a wave, the first wavelet gets posted at Pos­ter­ous and it returns the URL for you to check.

Pos­ter­ous seems to have the most diverse post­ing options of any blog­ging soft­ware avail­able, and the addi­tion of post­ing from waves puts it again at the forefront.

Now the bot needs to mon­i­tor com­ments and return them to the orig­i­nal wave for even tighter integration.

How to write a blog using Google Wave Robot for Pos­ter­ous [West­ern Bridge over Google Wave]

(via Ker­rie Anne’s Fridge Mag­nets)

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Five Things to Do When You Get Google Wave

In Link on 2009-11-09 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

You can spend ages get­ting used to Wave and what it can do, and still not learn the best way. Fer­nando Fon­seca has jot­ted down five things that he rec­om­mends you do when you first fire up wave, to help you break in.

Don’t Miss These 5 Things About Google Wave! [Bit Rebels]

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Where to Start

In Link on 2009-11-07 by Joshua Tagged: , , , ,

Gina Tra­pani, Adam Pash and the Wave com­mu­nity have put together a short ebook on Google Wave. I’m cer­tain as Wave becomes more com­plex and use­ful, this guide will grow and change to match. Gina and Adam are two of the clever­est tech­nol­ogy writ­ers on the web today, and their book is set to become one of the most author­i­ta­tive doc­u­ments on Google Wave.

The Com­plete Guide to Google Wave

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Trick or Treat [Extension]

In Link on 2009-11-01 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

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.

From the Google Wave Devel­oper Blog

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.

Trick or Treat Extension

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Add characters quickly to a wave

In Link on 2009-10-27 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

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)

Char­ac­ter Entity Bot [Google Code]

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Expecting invites to give out? This is why you might not have them

In Link on 2009-10-23 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

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.

How do I invite peo­ple to try Google Wave? [Google Wave Help]

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!