First Waves

Posts Tagged ‘fun’

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The Massive (but not Exhaustive) List of Wave Resources

In Post on 2010-04-16 by Joshua Tagged: blogging, community, fun, opinion, support, use case, users

When I started First Waves I wanted to keep my readers up to date with Google Wave news and keep on top of changes and updates as they happen. However, looking around the net I soon found many sites that already do a great job of keeping up with Wave news, and I hate the idea of rehashing the same stuff my readers could get at any number of excellent sites. So instead I have started to concentrate on larger news and “future direction” stuff here at First Waves, and I hope my readers are OK with the focus.

But I realise that many people do want up-to-the minute Wave information, so I’m going to lay out the sites and people I follow, and if you’re a hardcore Wave nut, you might like to follow them too. These people all have my utmost respect and admiration for their writing and dedication to Wave. I’ve included these sites in a Google Reader bundle called Best Google Wave Sites. If you trust my judgement, you can use the bundle to subscribe to all twenty-two feeds in just a couple of clicks! If you’d like to know more about the sites though, read on!

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It’s Easter. So Chill Out, Try Wave, Check out Mr-Ray and Say Hello!

In Post on 2010-04-01 by Joshua Tagged: chat, embed, fun, interface, use case, users

In honour of a couple of Wave extensions that allow wave-to-email collaboration, I thought I’d try something light-hearted instead of my usual wordy post. Mr-Ray is a bot/gadget combo from wave.to, that lets you add people to a wave by their email address, and they get sent a stripped back version of the wave that they can use to collaborate with you, without having to figure out and navigate the full-blown Wave interface. Embedded below is an example of the interface the email user sees. Please note, this isn’t the way the developers recommend using Mr-Ray — the address should be kept secret to avoid people posing as you. In this case, I KNOW it’s not me!

I’ve got a short holiday thanks to Easter, so I’ll leave this up until Wednesday to get to know my readers and give the non-wavers a chance to see a little bit how it works. I’ll check back regularly to reply so you come back too! If you’re already on wave and want to reply as you, contact me at nunn.joshua@googlewave.com and I’ll add you directly.
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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 — Â 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. Â 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, Â 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:Â http://serenity.davep.org/5×5/5×5.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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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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