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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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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.

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Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow the Waves You Choose

In Post on 2009-11-12 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

Prob­a­bly the most impor­tant part of the Wave expe­ri­ence for new user has been the abil­ity to search for pub­lic waves to join. With­out Pub­lic Waves many peo­ple would not have enough of a net­work to really expe­ri­ence Wave in full, and the Wave com­mu­nity may not have grown as quickly as it has. Pub­lic Waves have allowed quick access to tips and tricks, unof­fi­cial sup­port and gen­eral chit chat on a diverse range of topics.

The down­side of this was a sig­nif­i­cant gotcha: just click­ing a pub­lic wave was enough to add you to the Wave per­ma­nently and drag the wave into your inbox. From that point, your only recourse to silence the wave was to mute it (archiv­ing only works as long as no one else con­tributes), and mut­ing does not remove you from the wave.

Read More »

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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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Requesting an invite for Tweet…

In Status on 2009-11-10 by Joshua

Request­ing an invite for Tweet­board Alpha (http://tweetboard.com) by @140ware, for my site: http://firstwaves.org

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Expectations

Set suit­able expec­ta­tions. Despite the months of buzz, and blo­gos­phere– and Twitterverse-wide clam­or­ing for Google Wave invites, the prod­uct is still in pre­view and has some rough edges. There­fore, it does all par­ties good to be real­is­tic, even if every­body is psy­ched to be the first kid on their block to use it on a live project.

6 Tips For Using Google Wave On Your First Project.

This is the first of six excel­lent things to keep in mind when using Wave for the first time, let alone on a project. Wave is full of poten­tial, but peo­ple seem to for­get it’s still just get­ting off the ground.

I love that peo­ple are using it for projects already.

Posted 2009-11-10 by Joshua

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Find Local Waves

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

By now if you’ve been using Wave long enough you should know that a search for [with:public] gets you a big long fast updat­ing list of all the Waves that peo­ple have shared with the world. If you’ve been read­ing the Com­plete Guide to Google Wave you might know to nar­row down the search with tags and terms too.

But were you aware that Local Waves have popped up every­where as well, and you can find users near you just by plug­ging your city/suburb into the search (with the pub­lic wave search) eg. [with:public city name]. If you can’t imme­di­ately find a Wave for your loca­tion, you can start one! Just cre­ate a crafty title, and make the Wave pub­lic. Encour­age peo­ple who join to mark them­selves on a map, and shout out their Twitter/social details for peo­ple to con­nect elsewhere.

Have a tonne of fun, and stay safe!

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Blatant Reader Grab

In Status on 2009-11-10 by Joshua

Bla­tant grab for read­ers: Leave a com­ment any­where on http://firstwaves.org for a Google Wave invite. @reply me so I can get email details.