Posts Tagged ‘interface’

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Remove: Remove Yourself! Remove Others!

In Post on 2010-04-25 by Joshua Tagged: , ,

The most long-awaited feature (besides the seemingly dead “Draft” button) has finally been imlemented by the Google Wave team. That’s right, Remove Participant is here! What this means if you’re not an addicted Wave user, is that wave authors now have total control over who comes and goes from their waves.

remove-participant.png

This is a big deal for Google Wave. The button has been there since the beginning, but grayed out and unusable. It’s taken some of the shine off Wave that until today you were unable to recall waves or remove people added accidentally.

It works in a pretty straight forward way. You decide someone should not be a participant any more and you click remove. The person who is removed sees a big red X on the wave in their inbox and opening the wave shows the last thing they were able to see before you removed them. If you remove them before they even open the wave, they won’t even know it existed!

remove-from-wave-receiver.png

Part of me balks at the idea of removing waves right out from under their noses if they haven’t opened them. It feels somewhat dishonest — but it’s actually just fixing a email shortcoming! I think we’ve gotten so used to the idea that once something is sent, it can’t be unsent that it feels a bit weird to actually be able to do it again. Keep in mind though that this probably isn’t foolproof. If for example someone’s waves become “unsynchronised” while you are removing them from the wave, they might still see it — leaving you thinking that you got to it in time.

Another big issue in the months since launch has been Wave abuse. Waves have been destroyed by malicious (and accidental) addition of bots, or overwhelming the wave with large amounts of spammy text. At the moment, the best way to deal with this has been to reduce the abuser’s participation to “Read-Only” and report them to the abuse team. This remains the best way to halt an ongoing attack, but now it’s also possible to clean up after an abuser by removing the sign they were ever there in the first place.

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new look extension.png

Another minor update (perhaps a test) — the new Extensions link has been moved down to the drop-down folder area, and been separated into Featured and All. These were previously available as searches, while the original link simply showed all extensions. This is all part of the plan to get people using and developing extensions to showcase the strengths of Google Wave.

Extension Dropdown [Interface Update]

Tagged: , on 2010-04-13 by Joshua

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done-with-shortcut.png

Not a big thing, but a simple update that shows the shortcut for closing a blip on the Done button. Also missing is the Draft check box which has been present from day one but never worked. This could mean that the ability to create drafts might be low on the priority list, or the team decided that it was confusing to have non-functioning interface elements available. Either way, it’s a sign that the Wave team are serious about cleaning up Wave and making it less confusing for new users.

Shortcut on Buttons [Interface Update]

Tagged: , on 2010-04-09 by Joshua

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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: , , , , ,

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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A quote from Novell: Demonstrating Inter-company Collaboration

The Google Wave Federation Protocol excited us, because for the first time since email, it provided a way for collaboration systems to cooperate in a non silo’d way . The promise is that each organization can choose what product to use and the communication will flow unimpeded between the different systems, in the same way that people on different email systems can send and receive messages to each other today. This is a collaboration revolution we wanted to be a part of.
“Novell Pulse and Google Wave” — Google Wave Developer Blog.

This is exciting. More detail up soon.

Posted 2010-03-26 by Joshua

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French, Postboxes and Wave

In Post on 2010-03-18 by Joshua Tagged: , , , ,

When I was in grade 8 I learnt French. I say learn, but it was a handful of disconnected words and maybe a sentence or two that I couldn’t possibly remember now. The problem for me was that I knew I was going about learning it the wrong way, but relied on the teacher to teach me the “best way”. See, when I wanted to say a word in French, I first had to think of the word in English, then check my mental filing system for the equivalent word in French. It’s a slow and cumbersome way of recall that never really worked for me, no matter how many times we repeated the words by rote.

élégance by héctor*

I’m not bringing it up now to point out the flaws in my year 8 education, but to highlight something about the way people learn. When Wave was first announced and launched it was described by various people as “sort of like email” or “part instant messenger, part Google Docs”. This is because we often find it easier to understand something new when we “pin” it on a concept we already know and understand. Likening one thing to something else is sort of like my metal filing cabinet I had in 8th grade, useful up to a point, but no way to go about using something on an advanced day-to-day basis.

Which is why I think Google or a third party need to seriously consider how the non-tech-minded are going to learn how to use Wave.

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Read a Wave in a Fast, Simple Interface

In Post on 2010-01-31 by Joshua Tagged: , , , , , ,

Want to share a public wave with someone who hasn’t jumped on the Wave bandwagon? Need to publish a Wave in a way that keeps it safe from editors and wanna-be trolls? How ’bout this Wave Reader that takes a wave and displays it as a web page without the reader needing an account.

wavereader.png

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Restore a Wave to a former state, or make it Read-Only.

In Post on 2010-01-23 by Joshua Tagged: , , ,

In the first major update to the Google Wave client in what feels like ages, the Wave team have implemented two new features that will make a big difference in managing your waves. The first fixes one of the most shocking things about the first release: that anyone you invited could come along and edit any part of your wave. Of course the point of Wave is collaboration, but sometimes it was conceivable that you might not like anyone to be able to hack away at a wave, particularly once a wave was made public. Many good useful waves were effectively destroyed by granting the public editing rights.

the read-only tool in action
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Waver is a simple Adobe Air app for Google Wave

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

Put this in the same basket as Waveboard, the Mac only stand-alone app for Wave. Waver takes the iPhone/mobile Wave interface and puts it in an Adobe Air window on your desktop.

It’s a simple idea: take the minimal interface and make it available (faster) on the desktop, to dash off quick messages and keep an eye on your inbox (or other important folders). Because it’s so small you can pop it into a corner of your screen and keep working. While Wave is getting its feet, it also saves you dedicating a tab to it while letting you participate and build up the community.

waver-screenshot.PNG

Unfortunately because it’s simply a view to the mobile interface it suffers one of the same beta flaws — it does not sync changes until you click “done”. So if you’re used to the behaviour of the regular wave interface, you might find it difficult switch back and forth regularly. Additionally, none of the keyboard shortcuts from the main interface work, so you need to mouse around a lot more.

If you need a simple interface to use Wave, Waver might be for you,

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Waveboard — Stand-Alone Wave App

In Link on 2009-10-20 by Joshua Tagged: ,

Waveboard is an app for the Mac (and coming soon for iPhone) that puts Google Wave into it’s own application window. Observant readers might recognise that this is not really all that different from using Fluid or Prism to create a stand-alone site-specific window. Links from the site suggest it is related to Mailplane, a similar concept for Gmail.

Additionally, the demonstrated iPhone application seems to be no different from what Google has already made possible simply by bookmarking your Wave page to the home screen.

If however you don’t wish to worry about setting something like this up yourself you may wish to give it a try.

Waveboard is free software (at time of writing). Waveboard

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