In Post on 2010-03-02 by Joshua
closeAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn (@joshnunn) is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows.See Authors Posts (78) Tagged: bots, extensions, gadgets, official help
Recently, the Wave Team have made a big push to publicise more bots and extensions. In a post to the Google Wave Help forum, Kylie announced that some users might start seeing a new Extensions link in their navigation panel. Then enterprising Wavers noted that anyone could get access to this Extension information with a search for [group:google-wave-extension-gallery@googlegroups.com].
Now Google have made it easier than ever to submit an extension to the Wave Extension review team using a simple bot.
Create a new wave and add the Submitty bot (submitty-bot@appspot.com), and Submitty will create a submission form for you to fill out. At the bottom are a couple of checkboxes. If you check either of these boxes, you’ll be prompted to fill in more information about your bot and/or gadget. Finally, you add the Extension Review Group (google-wave-extensions-review@googlegroups.com) to your wave to submit your extension.
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In Post on 2009-11-15 by Cathie
closeAuthor: Cathie
Name: Cathie Tranent
Site: http://cathiet.blogspot.com/
About: Cathie Tranent (@CathieTranent) would have loved to have been a geek (said with love and respect) except for her amazingly short attention spa... oh look at the pretty birdy! She has offered her services to this blog as the ultimate "bloody end user" and will be presenting her thoughts on Wave and what it has to offer the techalogically challenged as the adventure unfolds.See Authors Posts (2) 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!
In Link on 2009-11-01 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn (@joshnunn) is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows.See Authors Posts (78) 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
In Link on 2009-10-23 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn (@joshnunn) is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows.See Authors Posts (78) Tagged: extensions, gadgets, games
For the geeks out there (oh wait, that’s all of you) this gadget is for you.
The Wave Dice Gadget generates a dice-roll for you, and supports “standard PnP dice types”.
Go get your game on in-wave!
Wave Dice Gadget [Google Code]
In Link on 2009-10-20 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn (@joshnunn) is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows.See Authors Posts (78) Tagged: chat, collaboration, gadgets, unusual uses
One of the biggest complaints from first time Google Wave users is the tidal wave of information and updates that threatens to suck their precious time away as they watch the chaos unfold.
In a carefully tended wave, the noise and chaos are minimal, but in some of the larger (public) waves, users have given up hop of ever keeping on top of it all.
Charles Lehner has created a simple chat gadget that might help calm the swell, by focussing some of the chat into a form most of us will recognise: IM. By introducing this gadget to a wave, you can give people an outlet to speak that brings in years of built up convention for managing the flow. People understand Instant Messaging, so you can add this gadget to bring normalcy to the new medium.
Perhaps you could embed this in a wave and encourage people to use it for idle chitchat, leaving the rest of the wave for the real-time collaboration on the task at hand.
As with other gadgets the Playback function records every new person who gets to the chat, and every message, so be aware that this can blow the size of your wave recording out with a lot of extra updates to wade through if necessary.
“Retro” Chat for Google Wave [Wave Samples Gallery]
The Google Wave APIs come in two flavors: Embed and Extensions. With Embed, you’re able to bring waves into your own site through a simple JavaScript API. For example, embedding a wave in a webpage is a good way to encourage a discussion among the visitors. With Extensions, you’re able to write programs, which are packaged as Robots or Gadgets, that provide rich functionality inside the Google Wave web client.
Introducing the Google Wave APIs
Posted 2009-06-05 by Joshua
In Post on 2009-06-05 by JoshuacloseAuthor: Joshua
Name: Joshua Nunn
Site: http://www.joshnunn.com.au
About: Joshua Nunn (@joshnunn) is a tech at a large high school who likes to keep on top of new technology as it emerges. He believes Google Wave is the only technology advancement that has a real chance to supplant email as the dominant form of communication on the web, and so is pretty excited to follow it as it grows.See Authors Posts (78) Tagged: api, bots, debate, extensions, gadgets, use case
This is Google Wave as a Platform, one of the “Three Ps” of the Wave. The API gives developers a way to plug in to the Wave product and offer new and interesting ways of using waves. For instance at the preview, a software robot developed using the API could be added to a conversation to translate your waves in real-time into other languages.
I’ll be covering more of the ways the API can be used in later posts, but for now I’ll say it’s powerful way to make an already compelling product even more useful.
Google wants developers creating value to add to their product on day one. Hopefully someone enterprising will use the API to bridge the gap between email and waves unless Google does it first.
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