First Waves

Posts Tagged ‘fun’

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Gadget. A fun one

In Post on 2009-11-15 by Cathie Tagged: api, fun, gadgets, wave

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.

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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Post

Find Local Waves

In Post on 2009-11-10 by Joshua Tagged: first look, fun, tip, use case

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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Trick or Treat [Extension]

In Link on 2009-11-01 by Joshua Tagged: bots, fun, gadgets, holiday

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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