Wave Bots

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Mar
10

What’s a Bot?

A bot looks like any other Wave participant or contact. It has a Wave ID in the form of bot@example.com, and you can add it to your Contacts list just as you would any Wave user. The only difference between a bot and a human Wave user is that the bot is programmed to automatically perform some function within a wave. A bot is an automated wave participant that examines the contents of waves to which it is added, and updates or adds to them based on what it’s programmed to do.

Add or Remove a Bot

To use a bot, add its Wave ID to your Contacts list as you would any other contact. Create a new wave, then add the bot to try it out.

As of this writing, Wave bots are the only participants you can remove from a Wave. (If you click a participant’s icon at the top of a wave, the Remove button on the pop-up that appears is enabled for bots only, not for human users.)

A Few Great Bots

Every day, more bots become available for use in Wave. This section highlights a few of our favorites, their purpose, and because it’s so early in Wave’s life cycle and some things don’t always work the way you’d expect, how well they’re working.

To try out any of these bots, add its Wave ID (listed in parentheses after its name) to your Contacts list, and then add it to a new wave.

Wikify (wikifier@appspot.com)

The Wikify bot adds links to and definitions from Wikipedia to your waves for a given topic. When you add Wikify to a wave, it provides instructions on how to add a link to Wikipedia for a topic, or a definition of that topic. Figure 8-1 shows how Wikify works.

Bot status: While Wikify’s functionality is limited, it is stable and works as advertised.

CleanTXT (cleantxt@appspot.com)

The CleanTXT bot is an automated janitor for a wave, especially helpful on active waves with lots of participants, like public waves. When CleanTXT is participating in a Wave, it automatically deletes empty blips, reduces repetitive blank lines in a blip, automatically corrects common typos (such as a mistyped “teh” for “the”), and inserts missing spaces after commas and semi-colons.

The CleanTXT bot also offers a hook into the Approver gadget, a thumbs-up/thumbs-down control that lets participants rate blips in a wave. With CleanTXT participating in your wave, type !approver to add the Approver gadget to that blip. Type !approver++ to have CleanTXT add the Approver gadget to every new blip submitted to the wave going forward.

CleanTXT is especially useful on public waves, which can get cluttered with accidental empty blips and typos quickly. See full instructions on how to use the bot and what it does at its homepage, http://cleantxt.appspot.com.

Bot status: Stable and working.

Polly the Pollster (polly-wave@appspot.com)

One of the most promising Wave bots available in the preview, Polly the Pollster lets you create multiple choice polls with custom questions and answers, and distribute them among any number of Wave contacts. As your contacts respond by selecting a radio button and clicking the Submit button, you can watch Polly’s poll results, in the form of a pretty graph, update in real-time. See a Polly-generated poll and results graph in Figure 8-2.

Bot status: Polly mostly works, but it can be unstable and unreliable at times, especially in waves with lots of participants.

Usage note: Use Polly first thing on a new wave; the bot won’t work if you add it to a wave already in progress.

Yelpful (yelpful@appspot.com)

The Yelpful bot offers an interactive, in-wave search interface to the business listings web site, Yelp.com. When you add Yelpful to a wave, it greets you and describes its usage with this message in a new blip:

Hello there! Usage: /yelp [location] [keyword] Example: /yelp sunnyvale ca mexican

Type a query, such as /yelp Brooklyn NY Sushi, and Yelpful responds with search results in a new blip.

Bot status: While Yelpful consistently responds to blips, its search results show up in HTML markup, which is not as readable as it could be.

TwitUsernames (twitusernames@appspot.com)

The TwitUsernames bot inspects the contents of any wave it’s participating in, and converts the words that start with the @ sign to Twitter user links. For example, if you add TwitUsernames to a wave and then type @malcolmreynolds into a wave, that word turns into a link to http://twitter.com/malcolmreynolds. Several of these are shown in Figure 8-3.

Bot status: Stable and working consistently.

Usage note: When you add TwitUsernames to a wave, it only converts future @twitter_usernames into Twitter user links. The @twitter_usernames that already exist in the wave’s blips are not converted, unless you edit the blips and click the Done button (or press Shift+Enter).

XMPP Lite (wave-xmpp@appspot.com)

The XMPP Lite bot sends you notifications of a wave’s changes via XMPP (an instant messenger protocol). This means that if you have Google Talk running, and someone changes a wave you’ve subscribed to via the XMPP Lite bot, you get those change notifications via chat.

To use the XMPP Lite bot, first add it as a participant to the wave you want to get notifications about. The bot adds a new blip with Subscribe and Unsubscribe buttons, as shown in Figure 8-4.

Next, add wave-xmpp@appspot.com to your Google Talk, Jabber, or AIM instant messenger client. Make sure you can receive messages from it (that is, that the bot is not blocked). Then, back in Wave, click the Subscribe button in the blip the bot added to the wave.

To unsubscribe from a wave, click the Unsubscribe button. See more about the XMPP Lite bot’s usage at http://wave-xmpp.appspot.com/public/xmpplite.htm.

Bot status: Stable and working, but very verbose. You receive a notification about every single change to the waves, so subscribe judiciously.

Madoqua (blog-bot@appspot.com)

Bloggers and other web publishers who want to try publishing the contents of their waves should try the Madoqua bot. When added to a wave, this bot provides customizable JavaScript code you can copy and paste into any web page to embed a wave, as shown in Figure 8-5.

As of writing, only people logged into Wave can see waves embedded on other web sites. However, the Wave team has hinted that anonymous access to public, embedded waves is on its way.

Bot status: Stable and working. Madoqua is a clone of the Embeddy bot.

Usage Note: You need to be comfortable with copying and pasting HTML and JavaScript widgets into your web page to use Madoqua successfully. Keep in mind that if you embed a wave that only certain people can see in a web page, everyone else sees either a Wave login page, or a message that they don’t have access to the wave. Even if you make the wave itself public and put it on a web page, it is still inaccessible to people who do not have a Wave ID—that is, people who didn’t get into the Wave preview.

Emoticony (emoticonbot@appspot.com)

The Emoticony bot converts textual smiley faces into smiley face images. Add Emoticony to your wave, and in any blip (except the first one), Emoticony automatically converts emoticons to images, as shown in Figure 8-6.

Bot status: Stable and working consistently.

Usage note: When you add Emoticony to a wave, only future textual emoticons are converted to images. Textual emoticons that already exist in the wave’s blips are not converted, unless you edit the blips and click the Done button (or press Shift+Enter).

Inbeddable (inbeddable@appspot.com)

You already know you can drag and drop images into Wave, but to include images that are already online, you must first save them to your computer and then upload them into a wave. The Inbeddable bot saves you that trouble. To embed an image that’s already online, add the Inbeddable bot to your wave, and then type the URL of the image.

Bot status: Stable and working consistently.

Usage note: When you add Inbeddable to a wave, only future image links are converted to embedded images. Image links that already exist in the wave’s blips are not converted, unless you edit the blips and click the Done button (or press Shift+Enter).

Acronym Decoder (acronym-decoder@appspot.com)

The Acronym Decoder bot expands common acronyms as you type into a wave. For example, with the Acronym Decoder participating in a wave, if you type NSFW the bot will turn the acronym into “Not Suitable for Work,” as shown in Figure 8-8. The Acronym Decoder draws from a dictionary of over 7,000 acronyms.

Bot status: The developer notes that this bot is sometimes unresponsive or unstable.

Define Bot (definebot@appspot.com)

The Define Bot offers dictionary definitions for any word that appears after define:word, as shown in Figure 8-9.

Bot status: Stable and working.

PDF Wave Exporter (pdf-wave@appspot.com)

Wave doesn’t offer a built-in way to export the content of a wave to a file, but the PDF Wave Exporter is a start. When added to a wave, this bot will export the textual contents of the root blip of a wave to a PDF file, and add a link to that PDF in a reply blip, as shown in Figure 8-10.

Bot status: Stable and working.

Usage note: While this bot provides a much-needed feature in Wave, it falls short. The PDF Wave Exporter bot includes only the text of the wave’s root blip in the resulting PDF—inline replies, replies that follow, images, the contents of gadgets, and file attachments are not included. Plus, formatted text gets lost in the conversion, like headers and bullet points.

Easy Public (easypublic@appspot.com)

In Chapter 5 you learned how to make a wave public using the easypublic@appspot.com bot. Just add Easy Public as a participant to any wave to give everyone on the Wave server access to your wave. (What Easy Public does is add the public group to the wave, which gives everyone access rights to that wave.)

Bot status: Stable and working.

Usage note: Because Easy Public is a bot, you can remove it from a wave, but that does not make your wave un-public again. Removing the Easy Public bot from a wave does not remove the public@a.gwave.com group that the bot adds. There is no undo for making a wave public.

RobotIndex (robotindex@appspot.com)

If you don’t want your Wave Contacts list to get cluttered with bots, well, there’s a bot available to help. The RobotIndex bot adds a search-as-you-type directory of bots and gadgets to your wave. Type the first couple of letters of a bot or gadget, and choose the name of the extension that looks interesting from the drop-down to see its icon, a short description of what it does, a link to its homepage, and a quick Add to Wave button, as shown in Figure 8-11.

Click the Add to Wave button to make the bot you chose a participant on the wave without adding it to your Contacts list (and forgetting what the heck the bot does, anyway).

Bot status: Stable and working.

http://completewaveguide.com

Wave Gadgets

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Mar
10

Wave Extensions: Gadgets and Robots

Wave extensions are add-ons that enhance your waves with new features and functionality. If you’ve ever used any Gmail Labs features, Wave extensions are very similar—they add functionality to the Wave client, normally accessible through a button inserted on your edit toolbar when you install the extension. While Gmail Labs add-ons can be developed only by Google employees, Wave extensions can be developed by anyone. As a result, an impressive handful of extensions are already transforming Wave into an even richer experience.

Wave extensions come in two flavors: gadgets and robots (aka “bots”).

What’s a Gadget?

Wave gadgets are small applications you can insert inside any wave to extend the default functionality of the wave. In fact, in Chapter 5 you learned how to use two of Wave’s built-in gadgets: the Maps gadget and the Yes/No/Maybe gadget. As you saw, when you insert a gadget into a wave, all participants in that wave share access to the gadget and can interact with it.

The gadget fun doesn’t end with those two pre-installed gadget extensions, though. Even at this early stage in Wave’s development, busy programmers have created gobs of great gadgets to provide you with even more clever ways to interact, share, and collaborate with other wave participants. You just need to know where to find them and how to insert them into your waves.

Like many aspects of Wave, you can insert gadgets into a wave in a couple of different ways. If you’ve installed a gadget extension—like the Maps or Yes/No/Maybe gadget extensions—you’ve already seen how easy inserting a gadget in a wave can be. While you’re editing a blip, just click the gadget button on the edit toolbar to insert it where your cursor is. Other gadgets, however, cannot be installed as extensions accessible from your edit toolbar (not yet, anyway). Never fear; you can still insert those gadgets in a wave. In the following sections, we’ll show you how to install both types.

Gadget Extensions

As mentioned earlier, both gadgets and bots fall under the category of extensions. At this early stage in Wave’s development, however, the naming conventions, as well as the process of installing and using extensions, are a little blurry. Most of the time, when you install an extension, the extension adds a new button to the Wave client’s edit toolbar—like the built-in Maps and Yes/No/Maybe gadget buttons. When a gadget extension is installed, you can click the new button any time you’re editing a blip to insert that gadget. You can, however, add gadgets (or bots) to a wave on a case-by-case basis, without installing an extension at all.

First, let’s take a look at how to install a persistent extension—the kind that adds a button to your toolbar and is always available when you log into your Wave client. Then we’ll detail how to add gadgets to individual waves on a case-by-case basis.

Install a Gadget Extension

In this section, you’ll learn how to install extensions to the Wave client that show up every time you log into Wave. Wave provides two different methods of installing such extensions. The first is simple but limited only to extensions featured by Google, while the second requires a little more legwork but allows you to install any extension you want.

Install a featured extension from the Extensions Gallery: When you logged into Wave for the first time, you should have had a wave in your Inbox from Doctor Wave, the fictitious mascot for Google Wave who welcomes you to your account. Inside that message is a link to an Extensions Gallery highlighting a handful of gadget extensions you can install on your Wave client, including the already-installed Maps and Yes/No/Maybe gadgets.

Once you’ve found your way to the Extensions Gallery, installing featured gadget extensions is a breeze. Each gadget is listed as a puzzle piece displaying the gadget name, what it does, a small logo or screenshot of the gadget in action, and an Install button, as shown in Figure 7-1. Click Install and confirm the installation. The extension adds a button to your Wave edit toolbar that allows you to easily insert the newly installed gadget into any wave with the click of your mouse.

Install an extension that isn’t featured: Anyone can develop a Wave extension, which means there are a lot of extensions available that you can’t yet install through Wave’s current Extensions Gallery. You can still manually install non-featured extensions to add quick access to your favorite gadgets; it just takes a little more know-how.

First, you need to install an extension called Extension Installer, which you can find at the bottom of the Extensions Gallery in a section labeled “For Developers Only.” While most extensions add a new button to the Wave client’s edit toolbar, the Extension Installer adds a drop-down menu next to the New Wave button on the Search panel.

Next, find an extension you want to install. Right now the best place to browse for gadgets is at the Google Wave Samples Gallery. If you find a gadget that looks interesting, click through to its page for details, then look for the Installer XML link on that page, as shown in Figure 7-2. Right-click the link and copy the URL (this link should point to a manifest.xml file that tells the Wave client a little about what the extension does and how to install it). Then head back into Wave.

When you are back in Wave, manually installing your extension is easy:

1. Click the drop-down menu next to the New Wave button on the Search panel and select New Extension Installer.
2. Paste the URL of the Installer XML you copied into the Insert Extension Installer pop-up and click Insert.
3. A new wave containing the same puzzle-piece layout you’re familiar with from the Extensions Gallery appears, only this one contains information regarding the extension you’re installing. Click the Install button, confirm the installation, and you have successfully performed your first manual extension installation.

Uninstall an Extension

As convoluted as the different current extension installation processes may seem, uninstalling extensions is actually very easy. If you decide you no longer want an extension cluttering up your edit toolbar, click the Settings link in the Navigation panel. (This performs a search for with:settie.) A wave called Extension Settings appears; open it and every extension you’ve installed is displayed, as shown in Figure 7-3. Now you can uninstall any extension with a click of the Uninstall button.

Once you’ve installed an extension, it’s always accessible in the Extension Settings wave, where you can reinstall or uninstall it as you like. If you’re sure you’ll never want to install a particular extension again, click the Remove button to entirely remove the extension puzzle piece from your Extension Settings.

Insert Gadgets by URL

Not all gadgets are available to install as extensions through the Extensions Gallery or manually. On top of that, you won’t always want to install a full-on extension just so you can use a gadget one time. Wave’s Add Gadget by URL feature inserts new gadgets into a wave on a case-by-case basis.

All you need to insert a gadget by URL is, obvious as it may seem, a link to the gadget. Once again, the Google Wave Samples Gallery is the best place to browse for single-use gadgets. In fact, while not all gadgets in the gallery have an Installer XML, almost all of them do have a Gadget XML link—the URL you need to copy to add a single gadget. Right-click the Gadget XML link, copy the URL, and then open the Wave client.

To insert the gadget in a blip, open a wave, start editing a blip, and then click the Add Gadget by URL button on the toolbar (it’s the one that looks like a jigsaw puzzle piece). Paste the gadget URL you copied into the pop-up, and then click the Add button, as shown in Figure 7-4. Wave inserts the gadget into the current blip.

A Few Great Gadgets

New Wave gadgets find their way into Wave every week, and as you saw in the previous section, finding them can be difficult. This section highlights some of our favorites and describes what they do.

You’ve already seen the Yes/No/Maybe and Maps gadgets, so we won’t cover those again. Most of the gadgets listed here are available through the Extensions Gallery we covered previously, so they are easy to install. (It’s no coincidence that the extensions Google features in the gallery are also the most stable.) For those gadgets that aren’t available by default or inside the Extensions Gallery, we’ve including both the Installer XML and Gadget XML links so you can either install the gadget as an extension (using the New Extension Installer) or insert it in a wave (using the Add Gadget by URL button).

Ribbit Conference Call

Have you gotten to a point in your wave where a quick conference call would be more productive than continuing your back-and-forth in Wave? Pop the Ribbit’s Conference Call gadget into a blip and instantly fire up a conference call with whichever participants you want, as shown in Figure 7-5.

This gadget is currently available in the Extensions Gallery.

Video Chat Experience

Sometimes a phone call just isn’t enough. The Video Chat Experience gadget—as its name suggests—allows you to start a video chat with another participant in a wave, as shown in Figure 7-6.

This gadget is currently available in the Extensions Gallery.

iFrame

The iFrame gadget embeds an iFrame in your blip that can display any web page you choose, as shown in Figure 7-7. Just click the Edit link, type the URL of the web site you’d like to embed, and then click the View link. You can also adjust the height of the gadget in your wave when you’re editing the URL.

Retro Chat

Feel like taking your conversation into an old-school instant messaging conversation? The Retro Chat gadget inserts an IM window into any blip that all participants in a wave can use, as shown in Figure 7-9.

Gadget XML

Installer XML

Napkin

The Napkin gadget lets you and other participants in your wave do some “back of the napkin” brainstorming, as shown in Figure 7-10. Draw your ideas when words can’t express what you’re trying to get across.

Gadget XML

HTML

HTML is the stuff that web pages are made of, and you can copy HTML code from sites all over the web (including the embed code available for most internet videos, for example). By default you can’t simply copy and paste HTML into a blip and expect it to work, however. What you can do is install the HTML gadget, click its Edit link, insert your HTML text, and then click the View link. In response, the HTML gadget renders your HTML code as it was meant to be displayed. See Figure 7-11 for an example.

Gadget XML

Installer XML

Chart Gadget

Share charts with participants in your wave with the Chart gadget; it’s easy to use, and capable of creating pie charts, line charts, bar graphs, scatter plots, Venn diagrams, and pretty much any kind of data visualization your heart desires.

Gadget XML

Installer XML

Picasa/Flickr Gadget

Want to share your latest set of pictures from your work party with your co-workers? Drop the Picasa/Flickr gadget in a wave, then point it toward an album on photo sharing sites Picasa or Flickr for clickable thumbnails that expand to larger views of the images.

Gadget XML

Google Wave Sample: Picasa/Flickr Gadget

List Gadget

Nothing beats a good table for making sense of information. Drop the List gadget in your blips to collaboratively build tables with any set of data you want, adding any custom columns you want.

Gadget XML

Lunchy

Is deciding where to eat with your co-workers a daily battle? Make it democratic by voting it out using the Lunchy gadget.

Gadget XML

Installer Wave (opens in Google Wave)

Mind Map

Insert the Mind Map gadget to collaboratively mindmap ideas with other participants in a wave. Figure 7-18 shows one example of how this chapter might map out in Wave using the Mind Map gadget:

Gadget XML

Installer XML

This is just a taste of the available Wave gadgets.

http://completewaveguide.com

Master Wave’s Interface

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Feb
15

Get to Know Wave’s Keyboard Shortcuts

The fastest way to use any software is straight from the keyboard, eliminating as many time-wasting reaches for the mouse as possible. Like Gmail and Google Reader, Wave comes with a host of keyboard shortcuts for navigating and editing waves as well as controlling in-wave image slide shows.

Navigation Shortcuts

Move around in a wave and scroll any panel using the following keyboard shortcuts. Mac users: substitute Cmd for the Ctrl key.

Wave Editing Shortcuts

Edit and reply to blips with these keyboard shortcuts. Mac users: substitute Cmd for the Ctrl key.

Image Slide Show Navigation Shortcuts

When you’re viewing a wave that contains multiple images, from the Images menu at the bottom of the wave, select View as slide show. (Sadly there’s no keyboard shortcut to launch a slide show—yet.)

Once you’re in the slide show, navigate the photos using these keyboard shortcuts.

Start Small with the Most Useful Shortcuts

A compiled list of keyboard shortcuts like the ones in the previous sections can be overwhelming to the point of confusion. As with learning keyboard shortcuts for any program, start small with the ones that perform the most common actions and are easy to remember, such as Enter to reply to a selected blip, and Shift+Enter to finish editing your current blip. Ctrl+I, Ctrl+U, and Ctrl+B (to italicize, bold, and underline text) all work the same way they do in your word processor. Ctrl+E is easy to remember because it lets you Edit a selected wave.

Once you’ve got the basic, easy-to-remember shortcuts down, move onto a few more and repeat.

Wave Interface Conventions

Not only is Wave audacious in its attempt to reinvent email, it also takes some bold bets with new interface controls and visual cues that are unconventional and therefore unintuitive to new users. In this section, you’ll learn how to recognize the ways Wave denotes things such as blip states, wave status, tags, and folders. Then, you’ll notice the Wave buttons and menus that are tucked away in less-than-obvious places. Here are a few visual cues and interface conventions worth pointing out as you get more comfortable in Wave.

The Non-Standard Wave Scrollbar

The scrollbar on the right side of Wave’s panels works a bit differently than the scrollbar in your web browser. Like most scrollbars, you can drag it up and down to scroll, or click its up and down arrows to move it. Unlike most scrollbars, the Wave scrollbar’s height doesn’t change. It’s always the same, small size, which puts its up and down arrows in close proximity to one another, as shown in Figure 6-1. Google’s intention is to benefit people accessing Wave on mobile devices or netbooks with a limited mousing area, but it has thrown off some preview users. Google explains “the deal” with the scrollbar in Wave’s Help section:

You might find that the scrollbar in Google Wave behaves a little differently from scrollbars in other Google products. To use it, you can drag the bar or you can use the arrows on either end of it—clicking the arrows without moving your mouse allows you to very quickly scroll up and down the page.

Even at this early stage, at least one developer has created a Google Chrome extension that reverts Wave’s custom scrollbars to Chrome’s native scrollbars.

Green Bars, Outlines, and Dots

Green is a very important color in Wave—it indicates activity, online status, unread, and selected blips. The green dot on a contact icon means that person is online. When you select a blip, it gets a dark green border around it (and you can perform actions on it with keyboard shortcuts). A lighter green vertical line in a blip’s left margin means it’s unread. (Press the spacebar or click to select the next unread blip in a wave, and watch its green vertical line fade.) A flashing green bar at the top of your Wave client alerts you to an incoming ping, or a change to a minimized wave. The number of unread blips in a wave are highlighted in green when that wave is listed in the Search panel.

The Wave Timestamp Drop-down Menu

In the upper-right corner of every blip, Wave displays the date or time of that blip with a small down arrow next to it. This is the timestamp drop-down menu. Click the arrow to reveal all the things you can (and can’t yet) do with a wave, from Edit this message, Reply to this message, Private reply, Hide all replies (disabled as of writing), Copy to new wave, and Delete. The Delete item is disabled for the parent wave—that is, the first blip in the wave. Every other blip can be deleted using this item.

The disabled Hide all replies item suggests that toggling every inline blip to expanded and collapsed view in one shot will be available at some point. Right now you can click the +/- (plus/minus) speech bubble at the top of any inline blip to hide or show it.

The … (Ellipses) Toolbar Button

Wave’s toolbars are packed with buttons that take up some width, and with three panels across, smaller screens and narrow windows can cut buttons off. That’s when Wave collapses the displaced buttons into a drop-down menu you can access from the … (ellipses) button, on the far right of the toolbar, as shown in Figure 6-2.

Similarly, Wave collapses a long list of wave participants into an expandable + (plus) button with a label that reads something like “1 more,” as shown in Figure 6-2. To see the full list of participants on the wave, click the small + (plus) sign to expand it.

Panel Manipulation Buttons and the “Window Shade” Pulldown

Wave provides panel manipulation buttons in the upper right corner of an open wave’s blue top bar, as shown in Figure 6-2. From left to right: the Minimize button shrinks a wave and docks it at the top of your Wave client, next to the Google Wave logo. The Maximize button minimizes all the panels except the open wave, filling the entire screen with it. The Close button (which looks like an X) closes the wave.

The Navigation, Contacts, and Search panels have only the Minimize button available—not Maximize or Close. When you minimize one of those panels, they dock at the top of your Wave client, in the space next to the Google Wave logo.

When a minimized panel or wave is docked at the top of the screen, a small down arrow gives you a “window shade” pull-down view that slides down over whatever appears in the main area of the screen. Click it to access what’s in that list without rearranging your current workspace. In Figure 6-3, the Search panel is minimized to give the open wave more room for viewing and editing. But when you click the down arrow on the docked Search panel, it pulls down over the wave’s contents.

You can also expand and contract the width of any Wave panel. Hover your cursor along the edge of any panel, and your pointer changes to indicate that you can click and pull that panel wider or narrower. This same technique works between stacked panels, like Navigation and Contacts: you can make Contacts taller while making Navigation shorter, by clicking and dragging the Contacts panel’s top edge.

Customize the Wave Interface

Now that you know how to minimize Wave panels, if you prefer a certain Wave layout, you can bookmark a Wave URL that restores that layout automatically when you visit Wave. You can also customize the order, size, and layout of the Wave client’s links and panels. Finally, you can open multiple waves at once to multi-task on a big screen.

Bookmark Your Preferred Wave Layout

Netbook owners or those who keep Wave open in a small window appreciate the ability to minimize unneeded Wave panels and maximize the reading or writing area on the wave they’re currently working on. To load Wave with certain modules minimized by default, you can use a Wave URL that contains the #minimized parameter. For example,

https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact

launches Wave with the Navigation and Contacts panels minimized. The

https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,minimized:search

URL minimizes the Navigation, Contacts, and Search panels, as shown in Figure 6-5.

While you’re looking at Wave URLs, the observant will notice that every individual wave has an ID that appears in your browser’s address bar when you click the wave. This means you can bookmark or IM a link to a wave to anyone who can see it. (That is, you can share a link to a public wave to anyone with a Wave account; but sending a wave’s link to someone not participating in it generates a message saying they don’t have access to it.)

Reorder and Color Navigation Panel Links

From the Inbox down to the Trash, every link in Wave’s Navigation panel is configurable. You can assign it a custom color or move it up or down the list. The default links are Inbox, All, By Me, Requests, Spam, Settings, and Trash. Each is a system-generated link to a specific search, for example, Inbox runs an in:inbox search, By Me runs a by:me search, and so on. (Only the All link doesn’t display search results for waves: it shows you every wave you have access to, unfiltered.)

To rearrange the links, or to assign an individual link a custom color, click the link to select it (it turns green), then click the down arrow that appears on the right. A drop-down menu appears that lets you move the link up or down the list, or set a color, as shown in Figure 6-4.

Open Multiple Waves

To open multiple waves, Ctrl+Click the waves you want in the Search panel. Mac users, use Cmd+Click for the same effect. If the Search and/or Navigation and Contacts panels are open, Wave stacks the clicked waves on top of one another in the right column.

However, if the other panels are minimized as shown in Figure 6-5, Wave maximizes the first wave you open across both columns. Then, when you Ctrl+Click or Cmd+Click to open more waves, Wave pushes the first wave you opened into the right column, and stacks the rest on the left as shown.

What Does THAT Do?

The preview release of Wave is still in an unfinished state, so a few items in its interface act as placeholders for functionality that’s either on its way or not needed yet.

Navigation Panel: Requests

The Requests link on the Navigation Panel will list “Waves from users not in your contact list.” Right now, waves from everyone appear in your Inbox. But once Requests is working, presumably waves from people you haven’t whitelisted by putting them in your Contacts won’t go in your Inbox, they’ll go in Requests. Perhaps this is one way that Wave will head off potential problems with Wave spam.

Navigation Panel: Settings

The Settings link on the Navigation panel lists system settings waves. Right now one of those waves is “Under Construction,” but another is available and working.

Navigation Panel: Spam

One of the big problems with email that Wave wants to solve—or avoid as much as possible—is spam. Still, Wave includes a Spam! button on the Search panel and wave toolbar that lets you mark waves as spam. When you do, that wave moves from your Inbox to the in:spam search results listing that you can see when you click the Spam link in the Navigation panel.

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Dive Deeper into Wave

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Feb
12

Format Your Waves

Wave offers light, word processor-like document formatting such as font faces, colors, headers, and bullet points to make your waves more readable and professional. When you’re composing or editing a wave, select the text you want to format and use the edit toolbar buttons shown in Figure 5-1. Keep in mind that toolbar buttons can get cut off if your wave is in a narrow area. If that happens, click the … (ellipses) button to expand the rest of the buttons into a drop-down menu.

Figure 5-1 shows a wave’s edit toolbar, and examples of Wave’s text formatting abilities. From left to right, a wave’s edit toolbar buttons let you:

• Bold, italicize, underline, and strike through text
• Select one of 14 font families (from Arial to Verdana)
• Assign a text color or a highlight (behind-the-text) color
• Choose one of four heading levels (of various sizes) or the default text size
• Create a bulleted list
• Indent or outdent paragraphs, and align text left, right, or center

The rest of the edit toolbar’s buttons, from the Link button on, insert various types of interactive content to your wave.

Insert Links into Waves

To add a link to a web page in your blip, select the text you want to link.

Not only can you link to external web sites in a wave, you can also link to other waves, wiki-style. While technically you can enter a Wave’s ID into the URL or Wave ID field shown in Figure 5-2, extracting a Wave ID is not an intuitive process. There’s a much easier way: first, while you’re editing your wave, search for the wave you want to link to in the Search panel. Then, drag and drop it into the wave that you’re editing to add the link. Remember that participants in your wave can open the linked wave only if they’re participants in it as well. When others click the link to the wave, it opens in the current wave panel.

Add Links, Images, and YouTube Clips Directly from Google Search Results

Another way to add links and other web content to waves is via a Google search panel built into Wave. Click the blue G+ button on a wave’s toolbar. From the pop-up, you can search the web for regular pages, images, and video clips. Click the tab to specify the type of content you want, enter your search terms, and press Enter. The results appear in the panel, each with an Add to wave link next to them. Click Add to wave for the desired results to insert them into your wave.

Web page links show up as plain links. Images appear as thumbnails in your wave. Video results can appear as either a link to the video, or, with an extra click, an embedded video player.

To include a video player in your wave, while you’re editing it, click the G+ button, then click the Video tab and search for “Serenity trailer.” You’ll get several results for the film trailer on YouTube. Click Add to Wave on the video of your choice. Initially it appears as a link with a small lightbulb icon next to it. Click the lightbulb and select Embed video from the drop-down menu to place the full YouTube player inside the wave, as shown in Figure 5-3.

This embedded video player is the first example we’ve seen of a Wave gadget: an interactive bit of web content in-wave.

Remove an embedded video player from your wave the way you do any gadget: in edit mode, hover over the player to display its drop-down menu in the upper-right corner, and then select Delete.

Attach Files to Your Waves

Like email, you can attach files to your waves, including images. There are two ways to add a file or image to a wave:

• If your browser has the Google Gears plug-in installed, you can drag and drop files from your computer directly into your wave. (Gears comes with Google Chrome for Windows, and it’s freely available to install for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari for Mac.)
• Or, click the paper clip icon on your wave’s toolbar, and then select the file you want to upload using the Open Files dialog box.

Except for images, most file types appear in the wave as an attachment, represented by a large icon. Figure 5-4 shows what a spreadsheet, Microsoft Word (.doc) file, a PDF, and a regular image look like as file attachments in wave.

By default, images appear as framed thumbnails when you upload them to a wave. To expand an image to its full size and remove the frame, while you’re in edit mode, hover over the image thumbnail. A small gray arrow pointing right will appear on the top right corner of the image. Click it to display the photo in-wave at full size, as shown in Figure 5-5.

Whether it’s an image or another kind of file, every file type has a caption or descriptive text included with it. By default, it’s the name of the file without the extension. Anyone participating in the wave can edit that caption, but it does not change the file name. If you click a file to download it, the downloaded file name will be the original name the file had when it was uploaded, not the edited caption.

Google limits file attachments to 20MB in size. Additionally, uploaded photos may lose quality. According to Google Wave’s help section:

All photos you upload will be downsampled—downsampling is the process of making a digital image smaller by removing pixels. Waves containing large files tend to load more slowly, so we’ve implemented this process in an effort to keep Google Wave nice and speedy.

This means that Wave isn’t suited for exchanging high-resolution photos or hosting large files. However, Wave positions itself as a photo-sharing tool for viewing web-quality photos online. It offers the benefit of collaborative photo captions and a sleek slide show for viewing photo collections.

Share Photo Collections in Wave

One big advantages of sharing photos with others in Wave is the ability to collaborate on photo captions. Another is the ability for anyone to add photos to a single wave. Rather than several people uploading separate albums of photos to different services after an event, everyone in the group can add images to a single wave. Like edits to regular wave text, caption updates and photo uploads happen real-time, and you can watch wave participants make them live.

Once photo captions are set, you can view a set of photos in-wave as a slide show.

Play a Photo Slide Show in Wave

When you add photos to a wave, their thumbnails appear in-wave, much like the thumbnail view in Mac’s Finder or Windows Explorer. When you’re done editing the wave, you can click an image to view it at its full size. Wave’s background color goes black, and the full-sized image appears mid-screen. Click the white X in the upper-right corner to close the image.

If you have multiple images in a wave, an Images button appears next to the Files button at the bottom of that wave. Click the Images button and select View as slide show to easily flip through the photos at their full sizes, as shown in Figure 5-6.

In slide show mode, image thumbnails appear at the bottom of the screen. You can click the Play button on the left to move through the images automatically. Alternately, you can click a thumbnail to see it full size, or use your arrow keys to move forward or back through the slide show. In slide show mode, you cannot see wave text or edit photo captions. To exit the slide show, click the white X in the upper-right corner of the slide show.

A slide show isn’t the only kind of rich, custom content you can add to your wave.

Add Built-in Gadgets to Your Waves

A Wave gadget is a custom interactive control you can add to your waves. Anyone can create gadgets that do a variety of things, and you can install the gadgets you want to use.

The Maps Gadget: Watch Your Collaborators Zoom and Pan Real-time

The lead engineers who built Google Wave are the same engineers who built Google Maps—so it’s no surprise that Wave has an excellent Google Maps gadget that puts an interactive map in your wave. On this embedded map you can pan and zoom, add points to locations, draw lines from one location to another, and fill polygons to highlight areas on the map. In edit mode, as you zoom, pan, draw, and switch between Map, Satellite, and Hybrid mode, if your wave’s participants are online and have your map wave open, they’ll see those changes as you make them live.

To add a map to a wave, while you’re editing the wave, click the Maps gadget button (the red pinpoint) on the toolbar. A map of your location’s general area appears in-wave. To find a specific address or location, search Google Maps by using the search box at the bottom of the Maps gadget. Click a result, and then add that pinpoint to your map by clicking the Create copy on map button, as shown in Figure 5-7.

You can also add location markers to the map by hand. In edit mode, zoom and pan to the location you want to point out, and click to add a marker there. Set the title and description in the pop-up box. Your map can include as many location markers as you want.

The Maps gadget also lets you add lines and filled polygons to your map. Click the Line and Polygon buttons to the right of the search box at the bottom of the Maps gadget while you’re in edit mode. Then click the map to start drawing. The Hand button switches you back into pan and zoom mode.

When you’re finished adding information to your map, zoom and pan to the area you want your collaborators to see when they open the wave, and select Map, Satellite, or Hybrid mode. Then click the Done button (or press Shift+Enter) to save your changes. This is the state that the wave’s participants will see the map in. While they’re viewing the map, they can zoom and pan to see other parts of the map and you will not see that activity. (A Return to shared view button lets you or the wave’s other participants snap back to the saved, shared state of the map.) If a participant switches into wave edit mode and changes the state of the map, draws on it, or adds markers, the rest of the participants can see that activity real-time.

To delete the Maps gadget, make sure you’re in edit mode, and then hover your pointer over the gadget. From the drop-down menu that appears in the gadget’s upper-right corner, select Delete.

The Yes/No/Maybe Gadget

The Yes/No/Maybe gadget helps you survey a group and tally responses to a simple question, such as “Will you make it to the party?” To add the Yes/No/Maybe gadget to your wave, click its button on the toolbar. (It appears to the left of the Maps gadget button, and its icon contains three small boxes colored green, red, and yellow.) Above the gadget, type your question. When you’re done editing the wave, add your participants to it.

To respond to the question, you and your participants click either Yes, No, or Maybe at the top of the gadget. When you do, your user icon appears in the appropriate column, and the gadget automatically tallies the total responses for each, as shown in Figure 5-8. To add a note to your response, click the Set my status link. That text appears next to your name in the response. You can change your response by clicking a different answer.

Spell Check Your Waves

Wave includes an automatic spell check feature that overrides any spell checker available in your web browser. As you type in Wave, misspelled words appear with a red underline. To correct the spelling, hover over the underlined word and click the drop-down menu that appears. Select the corrected spelling in the list, as shown in Figure 5-9.

If the word is spelled just how you intended, you can ignore the red underline. Alternately, select the correct spelling from the bottom of the suggestion drop-down menu.

Wave’s interface is available in U.S. English only. However, the spell checker understands and offers correction suggestions in more languages than just U.S. English, including Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Copy Waves

One of the main advantages of using Wave over email is that Wave doesn’t create multiple copies of a message as a byproduct of its usage—everyone included in the conversation updates it in a single place. However, there may be cases where you do want to make copies of waves, to share with different groups of people. It’s easy to do just that.

To copy a wave, click any blip’s timestamp drop-down menu and select Copy to new wave. Only the contents of the blip you copied get transferred into the new wave; none of its replies or past revisions are included.

Further, if you have read only access to a wave you’d like to use and edit for your own purposes—like a wave template—use the Copy to new wave feature to do so. See Chapter 10’s “Create Wave Templates for Reuse” section for more.

Play Back Wave Changes Over Time

One of Wave’s most powerful features is its ability to replay the entire history of a wave’s changes from creation to its current state. Every time you click the Done button (or press Shift+Enter) to complete an update or reply to a wave, Wave saves a snapshot of the document state. That version of the wave appears as one frame in its playback.

To play back a wave, open it in view mode, and then click its Playback button. A slider appears at the top of the wave, with rewind, back, forward, and fast-forward buttons on its left. Just beneath the slider, a yellow bar tells you when the wave was created, and how many revisions there are (as well as which one you’re looking at). For example, if you click the Playback button in a wave that you created on October 1st that has 33 revisions, the yellow bar reads, “You started the wave on Oct 1″ on the left, and “1 of 33″ on the right, because you’re viewing the first of 33 revisions.

To navigate between versions in playback mode, use the buttons on the left of the slider or the slider itself. Move one revision forward or back using the middle two buttons, and fast-forward or rewind to the beginning or end of a wave’s history with the outer buttons. As you move through its versions, changes to the wave from the previous version are highlighted in yellow and red text, as shown in Figure 5-10.

To restore a wave to a past version of itself, use the slider to navigate to the desired revision, and click on the Restore button.

Playback is an advanced feature for power users—it is familiar to software developers who use version control systems—but there are two everyday use cases for it.

Playback Use Case: Conversational Catch-up

Playback’s main purpose is to help Johnny-come-latelies catch up on what they missed when they’ve been added to a wave after it’s progressed through multiple changes. For example, if three co-workers are collaborating on a wave, and then add a fourth person to it, that last person is coming in on a fully developed conversation or document. To catch up with what happened in sequence, Wave’s playback functions as an instant replay. The fourth person can go back to what the wave looked like when it started, and watch what changes and contributions got added to it over time to see the flow of the conversation as it happened.

Playback Use Case: Clean Up Wave Vandalism

The ability to restore a wave to a previous version means you can easily undo unwanted changes, like vandalism on a public or group wave. If a participant has made unwanted edits to a wave, use playback and its Restore button to roll the wave back. Then, if you’re the wave owner and you want to prevent that person from editing the wave again, change his or her wave access to “Read only,” as described in Chapter 2’s “Wave Access Permissions” section.

Make a Wave Public

Instead of adding participants to your wave one by one, you can make a wave accessible to everyone on your Wave provider’s server by making it public. To make a wave public, there’s no one-click button; instead, there’s a trick.

Once the Easy Public bot is in your contacts, to make any wave public, add it as a participant. You’ll notice that Easy Public adds a special public group as a participant on the wave. This means your wave will now appear in search results for with:public.

Be prepared: Public waves can accumulate a large number of blips (into the hundreds), and as a result, become unusable. When you try to open a very active wave with more than a hundred blips, Wave is more likely to throw an error message. If you do get the wave open, playback isn’t likely to work correctly, especially if participants have added bots and gadgets, which can slow things down. People searching for public waves, especially at this early point in Wave’s roll-out, often haven’t been in Wave long enough to know what’s good Wave etiquette and what’s not, and things turn into a free-for-all. If you want your public wave to stay useful and intact for long, you’ll have to look after it, garden off-topic blips, delete slow or broken gadgets, and remove unwanted bots.

Send a Reply Only Certain People Can See

A group of friends are going to a movie that you’re not interested in, and you want to ask one friend in the group if she wants to do something else with you—without letting the rest of the group see your conversation. In Wave, you can send a reply within a large wave that only certain people can see.

To send a private reply, click a blip’s timestamp drop-down menu and select Private reply, as shown in Figure 5-11. A new, inline blip with an additional blue heading that contains its participants appears inline. Type your private message, and then add the people you want to include in the usual way. If someone is a participant in the parent wave but not the private reply, he or she cannot see the reply.

Another less obvious use of the private reply is annotating a wave for your own purposes, essentially leaving a “note to self” that you don’t want to share with others.

Publish a Wave on Your Web Site

Even at this early stage in its development, you’re not limited to only accessing your waves at wave.google.com. Wave offers the ability to embed waves on any web page where wavers can edit and interact with its contents, and all those changes appear in the rest of the participants’ Wave Inbox.

The process of publishing a wave onto your web page or blog is similar to how you embed a YouTube video onto any web page: you copy and paste a bit of HTML and JavaScript from wave into your page.

As of writing, only people logged into Wave can see waves embedded on other web sites. However, the Wave team has promised anonymous access to public, embedded waves, and when that happens, we’ll be seeing many more waves outside of our inbox.

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Find and Organize Waves

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Feb
9

Reduce Wave Inbox Clutter and Unwanted Notifications

Once you’re participating in a significant number of active waves, your Inbox gets busy fast.

Every time a wave updates, it moves to the top of your Inbox and its subject line turns bold. Wave’s instant, real-time notifications are a double-edged sword: wonderful when you’re waiting for important updates, terrible when new information you don’t care about distracts you. The Archive and Unfollow buttons can help you clean out your Inbox and silence chatty waves one by one.

Archive Waves

Wave’s Archive feature works like it does in Gmail: when you archive a wave, it moves out of your Inbox to “All” waves. The wave is still findable and accessible by clicking the All link on the Navigation panel, but it doesn’t appear in your Inbox. If someone updates an archived wave, however, it reappears in your Inbox as a wave with unread content.

To archive a wave, open it and click the Archive button on its toolbar. To archive several waves in one shot, select them individually by ticking their checkboxes in the Search panel. Alternately, select an series of waves by ticking a wave’s checkbox, then holding down the Shift key, and clicking on another one down the list. Once you’ve selected the appropriate waves, click the Archive button on the Search panel’s toolbar.

To “unarchive” a wave and move it back to your Inbox, select it and click the Inbox button on the Search panel.

Unfollow and Follow Waves

Ever get added to an email chain you don’t care about—but that just won’t stop showing up in your Inbox with reply after reply? In Wave, to stop getting notifications that a particular wave has updated, you can “unfollow” it. Select the wave and click the Unfollow button on its toolbar. An unfollowed wave still updates as participants edit it, but you won’t get a notification that there’s new content to read. If you search for that wave, its contents and all its updates are still available, even though you didn’t get every new change notification. Unfollowed waves have a special gray “Unfollowed” label on them when they appear in search results, as shown in Figure 4-1.

In the Wave preview, there’s no way to remove yourself from a wave someone else added you to. If someone adds you to a wave you don’t care about, unfollow it to opt out of its update notifications. You can always find waves you’ve unfollowed using the is:unfollowed operator in Wave’s search box.

Similarly, if there’s a public wave that you want to get update notifications about in your Inbox, select it and click the Follow button. This will have the same effect as if someone added you individually to that wave: any time that public wave updates it will appear as a new wave in your Inbox. Click the Unfollow button on a wave to unfollow it.

Mark Waves Read or Unread

Like Follow/Unfollow and Archive, there is also a Read and Unread button on the Wave toolbar in both the Search panel and in an open wave. When you click the Read button, a wave does not appear bold or with new blips in the Search panel. When you click the Unread button on an open wave or selected wave(s), all the blips in those waves get marked as unread, and the wave becomes bold in the Search panel.

There is currently no way to mark individual blips within a wave as unread. To mark an individual blip as read, click on it to select it.

“Delete” Waves

To send a wave to the Trash, select or open it and click the Trash button on the Search panel toolbar or on the wave’s own toolbar. Currently, trashing a wave doesn’t actually delete it; the wave still exists in the Trash folder. Deleting a wave entirely would be the equivalent of removing yourself from it as a participant, and since removing non-bot participants is not yet possible, neither is actually deleting waves. On October 30th, 2009 Google Wave product manager Greg Dalesandre said that the ability to delete waves and remove participants from waves is “coming soon.”

File Waves in Folders (and Sub-folders)

Like most email clients (except Gmail!), Wave offers a traditional folder system for filing your waves.To create a new folder, go to the Navigation panel, click the + (plus) button next to Folders, and type the name of your folder. The name can be as long as you like, and can contain spaces and special characters (such as punctuation).

To create a sub-folder, click a folder’s drop-down menu and select Add Folder. The sub-folder appears indented beneath its parent folder, as shown in Figure 4-2.

To delete or rename a folder, click its drop-down and select Delete or Rename. (Know that you cannot delete folders that have sub-folders in them unless all of the sub-folders have been deleted first. The Delete item does not appear in a parent folder’s drop-down menu until its sub-folders are deleted.) From the same folder drop-down menu, you can also customize the order of your folder list, and assign colors to folders.

To move a wave into a folder, go to the Search panel and select the wave. Click the Move to button on the toolbar, and then select the destination folder from the list.

If your browser has the Google Gears plug-in installed, you can drag and drop a wave or several waves from the Search panel onto a folder name.

When you move a wave to a folder, you’re transferring it from its current location to the destination. A wave cannot be in more than one folder at a time. Only you can see and use the folders you create, and control them. Therefore, Wave folders are best for private, single-destination filing.

If old-school folders are too limiting and private for your purposes, use tags instead.

Tag Your Waves

Tags provide a more free-form way to “file” your waves. Unlike folders, you can add as many tags to the waves you participate in as you want. Also unlike folders, everyone who is participating in the wave can see those tags, add to them, and delete them. Tags do not appear on your Navigation panel. They show up only at the bottom of open waves, and in the Search panel on each wave listed there.

To add a tag to a wave, first open the wave. On its bottom panel, click the + (plus) button to the right of the word Tags, as shown in Figure 4-3. Enter a tag and press Enter. To add another tag, repeat. You can add only one tag at a time, and tag names can have spaces in them. To remove a tag, hover over it and click the red X that appears.

Like hash tags on Twitter, or bookmark tags on Delicious, your wave’s tags are “public” in the sense that anyone who can see that wave can also see its tags. Therefore, tags are a great way for people to add their waves to a pool of waves on the same topic.

Already the Wave community is coming up with common tags for organizing public discussions like WaveDiscuss and WaveHelp. Search for with:public WaveDiscuss to see them—and learn about more advanced search techniques like this in the following sections.

Search Your Waves

Wave puts a deep repository of live-updating information at your fingertips, but it’s a complete mess unless you know how to find what you’re looking for. The Wave search box, much like Google’s web search box, is the key to getting exactly the results you need. Basic keyword searches return waves that contain those terms, while advanced search terms can pinpoint specific waves based on recipients, tags, and other attributes.

Basic Search Techniques

Common search engine conventions you’re already comfortable using in Google and Yahoo web search work in Wave as well. To search for waves that contain a keyword like “browncoat,” just enter browncoat into the search box and press Enter. To find all waves that contain the words “Kaylee” or “browncoat,” separate the keywords with an uppercase “or”: Kaylee OR browncoat. If you want waves that have both the words “Kaylee” and “browncoat” in them, enter Kaylee browncoat. (This query returns the same results as a search for Kaylee AND browncoat. By default, adding words to your query narrows results to only waves that contain all the terms.)

To search for an exact phrase like “I don’t wanna explode”, enclose it in quotes. This works well for proper names, too: a search for “Joss Whedon” does not return waves with just the words “Joss” in them, or even waves that mention “Joss” in one place and “Whedon” in the other.

The minus sign also excludes waves that match certain criteria from your results. If you want to find waves that mention Firefly but not Buffy, you’d search for Firefly -Buffy.

These basic search techniques get you pretty far. But Wave’s real search power comes in its special search terms that return waves based on participants, tags, folders, and other attributes.

Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Title or Caption

The format of Wave’s advanced search operators is operator:value. Just as you can search the web and narrow results using a query like site:completewaveguide.com Firefly, you can do the same with Wave. The trick is knowing which operators do what.

By default, a basic keyword search looks in the title and body of the waves you participate in. To limit your search to just wave titles, use title:keyword. Enclose multiple words in quotes. To search all your wave titles for the word “Reavers,” search for title:Reavers. To search for all wave titles with the words “space opera,” search for title:”space opera”.

Because you can associate captions with images in Wave, you can also specifically search the contents of captions. To search image captions, use the caption:keyword operator. For example, to search waves that contain images with “Gina Torres” in the caption, search for caption:”Gina Torres”.

Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Participants

Waves are collaborative documents and conversations, so you’ll want to know how to find waves by the people involved in them. These search operators help you find wave participants based on their role in the wave: whether they’ve created it, been added to it, or contributed to it. In this list, name doesn’t refer to a person’s full name; it’s the first part of his or her Wave ID. That is, if the Wave user’s ID is zoe@serenity.com, replace name with zoe.

You can also use the keyword me to refer to yourself. For example, if your Wave ID is you@example.com, you could find waves you created using creator:you@example.com, or the shorter, simpler creator:me.

Here is the full list of Wave search operators that find waves based on their participants.

If you’re getting unexpected results when you search for waves by participant, remember a wave’s structure: a given wave can consist of many blips with different participants. For instance, a group wave with half a dozen participants that has a private reply to just one person in it will show up in search results for onlyto:name searches for that one person.

Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Location or Read State

You may want to find waves based on what folder they’re in, what tag they have, or whether they’re read, unread, followed, or unfollowed. Here’s the full list of advanced Wave search operators that return waves based on location and state.

Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Attachment, Gadget, or Links

To narrow search results to waves with file attachments, gadgets, or links in them use these advanced operators.

Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Time Period

So far Wave’s menu of search operators is pretty thorough—but strangely, date searches aren’t what you’d expect. Instead of searching for waves by a specific date, you search by time period relative to today’s date using a date term value.

In its search documentation, Google explains:

Accepted date terms are day, week, month, or year. You can abbreviate days, weeks, months, and years to a single letter—d, w, m, and y, respectively. You can also add N before any of the date operators to specify the number of days, weeks, months, or years over which you’d like to search. N must be greater than zero. For example, searching with past:3days will find waves from today, yesterday, and the day before yesterday.

The full list of relative date term operators is as follows.

Advanced Operators: Find Waves by Language

Although it doesn’t appear in Wave’s official search documentation, Wave can also search waves by what language they’re written in with the lang:lang_abbrev operator. For example, lang:en returns waves written in English. To see only public waves not written in English, use the with:public -lang:en operator. Use this operator with caution: because it is undocumented, its behavior could be unpredictable (especially with waves that contain text in multiple languages).

The more you use Wave, the more you’ll notice that advanced searches for waves are baked into its interface. For example, your Inbox is the results of an in:inbox search. The Trash is just results for an in:trash search.

You can even see recent conversations with a specific person by clicking the Recent Waves button on the Contact pop-up—that displays results for a with:name search, where name is the contact in question.

Combine Wave Search Operators into Useful Recipes

Wave’s search capabilities are most powerful when you chain criteria together to see custom lists of your waves. Here are a few useful Wave search recipes you can try.

• Search public waves with with:public: To find public discussions about almost anything, search using the with:public operator, which returns waves with public@a.gwave.com as a participant. For example, to search all public waves for the word “browncoats,” use with:public browncoats.
• Create an only-to-me Inbox with onlyto:me is:unread: See unread waves in which you and the creator are the only participants. This is a great way to find waves you probably need to respond to.
• See “Sent” waves with creator:me -is:note: See all the waves you’ve created and added others to participate in; this set of results creates something loosely akin to an email program’s Sent box.
• See waves you’ve created for private use with is:note: Even though Wave is a collaboration tool, you can still create waves and add no other participants, whether you’re in the process of drafting something to share later, or just keeping some “notes to self.” The is:note operator returns only waves you’ve created, and in which you’re the only participant.

Once you tweak your favorite searches to fit your needs, you can save them for reuse.

Saved Searches and Wave Filters

Now that you’ve concocted your favorite wave queries, you can save them for reuse on the Navigation panel. To do so, enter your query in the search box and press Enter to run it. At the bottom of the Search panel, click the Save search button, then enter a name for your search in the Title field. Click the Submit button to save it, as shown in Figure 4-4.

Once you’ve saved a search, it appears on the Navigation panel under Searches (just above Folders). Like folders, you can click a search’s drop-down menu to edit the query or its name, move it up or down the saved searches list, or add a color to it. Also like folders, you can create a new saved search by clicking the + (plus) button next to Searches on the Navigation panel.

Filter Incoming Waves Based on Search Criteria

The Save search pop-up also contains another interesting and powerful section: Filter Actions. Like email filtering rules, here you can tell Wave to automatically perform actions on waves that meet the search criteria in the Query field.

In the Wave preview, there are only two available filter actions: Mark as read and Archive. By checking the Archive box on a saved search, you’re telling Wave to automatically move any waves that meet the search criteria out of your Inbox. By checking the Mark as read box on a saved search, you’re telling Wave to mark those waves as read. (Automatically checking a wave as read has a similar effect as unfollowing a wave in that you’re suppressing unread notifications, except that the state of these waves is read, not unfollowed.) Checking both boxes means new waves that meet your search criteria are both archived and marked as read.

http://completewaveguide.com

Manage Your Wave Contacts

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Feb
8

Add and Remove Individual Contacts to Wave

Your Wave Contacts list is a subset of your Google account’s existing Contacts list. Anyone who signs up for Wave using a Google account that’s already in your Gmail Contacts list shows up in your Wave Contacts panel automatically. You can also add and remove people from your Wave Contacts list by hand.

Add Someone to Your Wave Contacts List

You can add people to your Wave Contacts list only if they already have a Wave account. During the invitation-only Wave preview, that’s a limited number of people. If someone you know has a Wave ID, you can add him or her to your Wave Contacts list in several ways, depending on the context:

• Inside a wave: If you’ve joined a wave with someone who isn’t currently one of your contacts, adding them as a contact is simple. Just click the contact’s icon displayed at the top of the wave and then click the Add to contacts button displayed in the Contact profile pop-up, as shown in Figure 3-1. Your new contact instantly joins the top of your Contacts list.

• From the Contacts panel: There are two methods for adding a new Wave contact from the Contacts panel in the lower-left area of the Wave client. Both require that you know the Gmail address or Wave ID of the person you’d like to add. (Either works, as Wave automatically recognizes and converts Gmail addresses to Wave IDs—e.g., mal@gmail.com becomes mal@googlewave.com).If you enter the ID of your desired contact directly into the Contacts search box, Wave informs you that the contact could not be found (among your current contacts), then asks you if you’d like to add that user to your Contacts list. Click the Add to contacts button and you’re set.

  Alternately, click the + (plus) button in the lower-right corner of the Contacts panel to launch the Add a new contact pop-up, as shown in Figure 3-2. Again, just enter the Gmail address or Wave ID of the user you want to add, and—assuming that person has a Wave account—it asks you to confirm that you’d like to add that user to your contacts. Click Submit to confirm.

• From your Google Contacts manager: As we mentioned earlier, Wave pulls in contacts from your Google account, which means that every one of your Gmail contacts who is also using Wave appears in your Wave Contacts list automatically. It also means that you can manage your Wave contacts through the Google Contacts interface.

  

  Figure 3-3. You can add a new contact or edit existing contacts’ information in Google Contacts.

  To access Google Contacts, click the Manage contacts link at the bottom of the Wave Contacts panel. There you can add a new contact by clicking the + (plus) button in the upper-left corner of the page. Google Contacts opens a New Contact form, where you can add your new Wave contact’s name and Gmail address or Wave ID, along with additional contact information like phone number, address, birthday, and more, as shown in Figure 3-3.

You can also edit information for any of your contacts in Google Contacts by searching for the user in question, opening their information panel, and adding or removing any bits of info you like.

Remove Someone from Your Wave Contacts List

If you’ve decided, for whatever reason, that you want to remove someone from your Wave Contacts list, you can only do so by entirely deleting that user from Google Contacts. Here’s how.

1. Click the Manage contacts link at the bottom of the Wave Contacts panel, which opens Google Contacts in a new window.
2. Find the contact you want to remove by either entering the contact’s name or Google username (his username is the “you” portion of the you@googlewave.com address) into the Google Contacts search box.
3. Once you’ve found the contact you’re looking for, click that contact’s name in the middle column of Google Contacts to display his contact information.
4. Click the Delete contact button in the upper-right corner of the contact information panel, as shown in Figure 3-4.

Keep in mind that Google Contacts is the central contact management tool for all Google applications associated with your Google account, so removing a Wave contact using Google Contacts also removes that contact from every Google application you use, from Gmail and Picasa, to Google Voice and Chat.

Remove a Participant from an Individual Wave

It’s not difficult to accidentally add a contact to a wave that you hadn’t meant to include her on. Chances are your boss isn’t interested in joining a wave with your friends in which you’re discussing where to go out this weekend, for example, and you’ll want to remove her the minute you realize the mistake. If you were composing an email, you’d simply remove the accidental contact addition before you sent the email, but because Wave is so different from email, removing a contact has larger implications.

This presents a bit of a problem, and frankly, it’s one that the Wave team has yet to address. Within a wave with several participants, you can have a private conversation with one or more participants inline. You can also copy a wave into a fresh wave to which you can add (or not add) whomever you like. However, currently there is no way to remove a contact from a wave once she has been added.

There is one exception to this rule: unlike human participants, you can remove bots from a wave at any time.

Add a Group of Participants to a Wave

If you want to wave with a specific (or large) group of people, adding one contact at a time is a tedious process. To address this, Wave has preliminary support for participant groups using Google Groupsto manage members and invitations. To get started with groups in Wave, you can either join an existing Google Group or create your own Google Group. Then, learn how to use the special “public” group and access permissions to control how you let others participate in your waves.

Use an Existing Google Group in Wave

If you’re already a member of a Google Group, using it in Wave is a piece of cake. All you’ve got to do is add the Google Group to your Wave Contact list the same way you added new contacts above, using the email address of the Google Group as the address of the new contact.

If you’re not a member of any Google Groups, you can search for a group you’re interested in joining at the Google Groups homepage at http://groups.google.com.

Once you’ve added the Google Group as a Wave contact, you can give all the members of a Google Group access to any wave by adding that contact as a participant on that wave. When members of the Google Group search for group:address, where address is the email address of the Google Group, they will find waves with that group, as shown in Figure 3-8.

Unfortunately Wave’s current implementation of groups is less than perfect. Email messages to a Google Group don’t show up in Wave, and waves to a Google Group don’t show up via email. You also can’t add new users to your Wave group from inside Wave. Wave Product Manager Steph Hannon called group support via Google Groups “a bit tricky” right now and said the team is working on making it easier.

Create Your Own Wave Group Using Google Groups

If you can’t find an existing Google Group you’d like to use in Wave, you can create your own in a few steps:

1. Visit the Create a group page at Google Groups.
2. Give your group a name, an email address (which you’ll need when you add the group as a contact in Wave), and a description, as shown in Figure 3-9. Set the access level for your group. It can be Public, Announcement-only, or Restricted so only people you invite can join.
3. Click the Create my group button to finish. Once created, you can invite members to the group from your Google contacts or just let new members find you.

Once you’ve created your group, starting waves with the group works the same way as we described above. Add the group’s email address as a contact in Wave, then add that contact to any wave you’d like include the group in.

If you’re an administrator of your group, you can tweak your group’s access settings to fit your needs by clicking the Access link on your group’s settings page. Keep in mind that most access settings won’t change when the group is used in Wave. Only the following settings will change how the group works in Wave:

• Who can view messages?
  • “Only members can view group content” – Only group members may view waves whose participants include this group. Any individual participants will also be able to view the wave.
  • “Anybody can view group content” – Any users may view waves with this group. They’ll need to either search for the wave or have a direct link to the wave.

• Who can post messages?
  • Managers only – Only managers of the group will be able to add the group to waves or edit waves with that group.
  • Members only – Only members of the group will be able to add the group to waves or edit waves with that group.
  • Anyone can post – Anyone can add the group to waves or edit waves with that group.

The “Public” Group

A special system group in the Wave preview, public@a.gwave.com, represents every user in Wave. Therefore, if you add public@a.gwave.com to your contacts and to a wave, you are giving everyone access to the wave—you’re making it public. As you learned in Chapter 2, a search for with:public will return all waves on which public@a.gwave.com is a participant.

The public group can be squirrely at times and disappear from your Contacts list, which makes it difficult to add to a wave. See Chapter 5’s “How to Make a Wave Public” section to learn about a bot that simplifies the process of making waves public.

Group and Individual Access

In Chapter 2 you learned how to limit participants’ access to waves to read only or reply only. You can apply these access permissions to groups in the same exact way: just click on the group’s icon at the top of the wave, and set the permission level from the drop-down in the pop-up menu.

The most important thing to know about group permissions is that an individual participant’s access trumps that of the group, even if he or she is a member of the group. For example, if the public group has read-only access, you can add specific participants to it and give them full access. When you do, they will be able to edit blips in the wave, even though they’re part of the public group which only has read-only access.

This combination of different group and individual wave participant access gives you more control over what you can share in wave without fear of vandalism.

Ping a Contact

Sometimes you want to initiate a quick back-and-forth with a contact, especially if you can see she’s online. In the pre-Wave world, you’d use instant messenger to do that. Sure, every piece of communication in Wave is real-time, but you don’t want to compose a full-on wave to ask someone a quick question. Further, the pop-up notification of a new instant messenger session is still a useful mechanism for getting a contact’s attention. That’s where Wave’s ping feature comes in.

A ping is the easiest way to start a quick exchange with one or more Wave contacts. You compose your ping’s message in a smaller, chat-like window (unlike regular waves). Much like IM, a new ping pops up and flashes its contents on its recipients’ screens and browser tabs.

To get someone’s attention in Wave with a ping, click his name in the Contacts panel to open his Contact information pop-up. Then, click the Ping User button (where User is that contact’s name).

The ping panel appears near the top of your window, pulled down with enough room for you to type a short ping message, as shown in Figure 3-11. The ping panel minimizes to the top of your recipient’s Wave client, but it flashes green to indicate an active, incoming ping. The text of your ping also flashes in your recipient’s browser tab.

Apart from its location and smaller size, a ping looks—and acts—like a regular wave. If your contact is offline when you ping him, Wave displays that flashing, minimized ping to him the next time he logs in.

While you’re chatting back and forth with a contact in a ping, the conversation stays out of your Wave Inbox. Once you close the ping, that conversation moves into your Inbox as a regular wave. If you’d like to view a ping in a larger wave panel from the start, click the Expand button at the top of the ping panel. (It’s the middle icon that looks like the Restore button in Microsoft Windows.)

In-Wave Pings

You can also ping a contact from a wave. If you’ve already got a wave open with a contact you’d like to ping, click your contact’s icon at the top of the open wave and, as before, click the Ping User button.

However, when you start a ping from inside a wave, the ping displays inside that wave for both you and whomever you’re pinging, as shown in Figure 3-12—it does not pop up an attention-getting notification. An in-wave ping is a handy way to have an off-topic or private back-and-forth with one or more participants without involving every other wave participant. In fact, an in-wave ping behaves very much like a private reply.

Add More Participants to a Ping

You can add other participants to a ping the same way you add them to a wave: click the + (plus) button at the top of the ping (next to the contact icons) and search for the contact(s) you want to add. Because pings “minimize” when they’re not active, you can’t drag and drop contacts to a ping from the Contacts panel.

When to Ping?

In much the same way as you might start a chat with someone inside Gmail rather than send an email, you ping someone to start a quick, real-time exchange. Pings work best when you want to have a quick chat, or get someone’s attention in Wave if you see that he or she is online.

If a Wave user is online, Wave adds a small green dot to the lower-right corner of that person’s icon anywhere it appears in the Wave client—from the Contacts panel and Search panel to open waves, as shown in Figure 3-13. If you see a green dot on a contact’s icon, they’ll see your ping straightaway. (Even if your recipient has Wave open in a background tab, that tab’s title will flash and show your ping’s contents.)

Edit Your Wave Profile

Your Wave profile contains identifying information about you: your name, photo, web site, and a status message. Other users see your profile information in the pop-up that appears when they click your icon in the Contacts panel or at the top of any wave.

To edit your Wave profile, click your icon or name at the top of the Contacts panel, and then click the Edit Profile button on the Profile pop-up. This opens a wave where you can set your profile information, as shown in Figure 3-14.

In this wave, you can set how your name appears to other Wave users, your Wave icon photo, your web site, and your Wave status message, which appears next to your icon and name on the Contacts panel.

Set Your Wave Status

To add a little more personality to your Wave pop-up profile, you can set a status message that becomes visible to your Wave contacts—much like you can in Google Chat or other instant messaging applications. While not integrated with any other Google service (yet), you can use the status message for traditional, functional purposes, like telling your contacts that you’re busy (handy because Wave doesn’t let you set generic statuses like “busy” or “away”), or you can just use it to remind them that “Everything’s shiny, Cap’n.”

To set your status, click your name or icon at the top of the Contacts panel and type your desired status message into the text box below your name, as shown in Figure 3-15. Press Enter or close the Contact pop-up to set it. Your status will persist through Wave sessions and remain set even if you log into Wave from different computers.

http://completewaveguide.com

Get Started with Wave

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Feb
7

Wave Preview Invitations

The first release of Google Wave is a limited preview that’s not open to the public. It’s accessible only to people who have received an email invitation to try out the system, so new users interested in Wave can’t just go to the Wave homepage and register for an account.

As a collaboration tool, Wave can’t live up to its potential until you’ve got people to participate in waves with you—but the invitation wall means there’s a good chance that not many of your acquaintances are in Wave. Google offers two ways for uninvited users to secure an invitation to Wave: they can either sign up for an invitation with Google or receive an invitation from a friend who’s already using Wave.

How to Give Someone an Invitation to the Wave Preview

Google has sent out over one million invitations to the Wave preview, and each person they invite also receives invitation “nominations” to share with their own contacts. If you’re already using Wave, you can determine whether or not you’ve got invitations to hand out by entering the following search into the Wave search panel: title:"Invite others to Google Wave". If you’ve got unused invitations in this wave, you can send one to any contact by simply entering her email address into the Enter an email address text box, as seen in Figure 2-1. Then click the button labeled Add to invitation list.

Figure 2-1. Search title:"Invite others to Google Wave" to find your invitation wave and use it to invite others to Google Wave.

The invitation may not get sent out instantly—it could take anywhere from a day to a few weeks. Google is working its way through the nomination queue at a rate that keeps pace with the Wave preview’s server capacity. However, a nomination from an existing Wave user is the speediest way to obtain an invitation.

If your search for invitations turns up nothing in your inbox, don’t lose hope. As Google gains confidence that their system can handle more invitations, you’ll eventually find the invitation wave in your inbox. Similarly, Google will slowly add more invitations to your account over time, even if you’ve used up all of your available invitations.

How to Get an Invitation to the Wave Preview

If you don’t know anyone already using Wave who can nominate you for an account (see above), you’re not out of luck. You can request an invitation directly from Google at their aptly-named Request for invitation to Google Wave signup page. Slowly but surely the people who express interest in trying Wave are receiving invitations. But don’t wait. Interest in Wave grows by the day, so the sooner you request an invitation, the better.

If all goes well with one of the methods above, eventually you’ll receive an invitation to the Wave preview in your email inbox, as shown in Figure 2-2.

Figure 2-2. When you’ve been nominated for a Wave invitation, eventually you’ll receive an email inviting you to the Wave preview.

Get to Know the Lay of the Land

Once you’ve snagged an invitation to Wave, you’re ready to register, log in, and go for a ride. Here are a few important details worth knowing before you jump in.

Your Wave ID Is Not an Email Address (Even Though It Looks Like One)

When you register for your account at wave.google.com, you use your Google account credentials—i.e., your you@gmail.com or you@googlemail.com email address—to claim your new Wave ID. However, your Wave ID will be something like you@googlewave.com.

Even though your @googlewave.com ID looks like an email address, it’s not: you can’t receive or send email from or to that ID. People can only wave you at that ID.

The Anatomy of the Wave Client

Now that you’ve registered, it’s time to log into Wave and get your first glimpse of the Wave client. The default Wave view is a three-column, four-panel layout, as shown in Figure 2-3. From left to right, the first column includes the Navigation panel on top (like the Gmail sidebar with its links to your Inbox, Sent, and labels) and Contacts panel below it (like your Gmail Chat buddy list). The second column is the Search panel, which contains a list of active waves in your Inbox. The third column is where you can start a new wave or open an existing wave.

Figure 2-3. The default Wave client consists of three columns and four panels.

When a panel’s contents are long enough to require it, the panel gets a scrollbar on its right side that’s a little different than the scrollbars you might be used to. (You can see it on the open wave in the third column in Figure 2-3.) To use the scrollbar, click its up or down arrow to move it, or click and drag the entire scrollbar to scroll.

The Anatomy of a Wave

The Wave client layout may seem similar to a three-column email client. However, an individual wave is much different than an email message. Waves have more structural elements than flat email messages do, so there are new terms to describe them. We’ll use this terminology throughout the book, so it’s important to understand what the different elements of a wave are called from the get-go.

A wave is made up of distinct, threaded conversations known as wavelets. Participants can create multiple conversation threads within a wave, so a single wave can contain several wavelets. Each wavelet, in turn, is made up of a several distinct messages called blips. When you select a single blip, Wave outlines it in green. Blips are like a single message in the midst of an email thread in Gmail, except blips are editable by any participant in a wave.

Figure 2-4. The anatomy of a single wave with two wavelets and five blips, adapted from the Google Wave API Overview.

In Figure 2-4, the wave contains two wavelets. The first wavelet has five participants and three blips; the second has only two participants and two blips. (The second wavelet has only two participants because one initiated a private conversation with the other to “bail” on the rest of the group without hurting their feelings.) When you click the New Wave link or button, you’re creating a wave that contains a single wavelet with a single blip, to which you can add content.

Make Your First Wave

Wave is fundamentally a document collaboration tool, so it’s not very fun or useful if you’ve got no one to wave. Chances are that whoever invited you to the Wave preview appears in your Wave Contacts list when you log in, so that person’s a good first person to wave. Otherwise, you can try out Wave by participating in public waves.

If One of Your Contacts is Already in Wave

Wave uses your Google account’s Contacts list, so if any of your existing Google contacts is also using Wave, those people automatically show up in your Wave Contacts list. (For more on Wave contacts. If you don’t have any contacts using Wave—that is, your Contacts panel is empty—you can still test out Wave. Skip to the next section to see how to join a public wave.

If one of your contacts is already in Wave, you wave that contact in a couple of ways:

• Click the New Wave button at the top corner of the Search panel (to the left of the search box), or click the New Wave link in the third column of the Wave client. Wave opens a new, empty wave in the third column. Type your first message and click Done. Once you do, Wave prompts you to add participants with a drop-down contacts menu, as shown in Figure 2-5. (This same menu displays any time you click the + (plus) button at the top of a wave.) Click a contact to add him or her to the wave.
  
• Figure 2-5. You can add new participants to a wave by clicking the + (plus) button.
• Alternately, in the Contacts panel, click a contact’s icon, then click the New Wave button on their profile panel, as shown in Figure 2-6. Type your message, then click Done.
  Figure 2-6. Search for contacts and start a new wave from the Contacts panel.

Once your new wave has another participant, you can see that person’s icon in the light blue area near your icon at the top of the wave. That wave appears in the participants’ Inbox(es) the moment you add them to the wave (even if you haven’t typed a message yet). Once you start typing, other participants can enter and update the wave at the same time. Congrats, you’re waving!

Even after your wave conversation and updates are well underway, you can add any new contact to it at any time—again in a couple of ways. Let’s say you’ve already started a wave with Mal, but you realize halfway through that Inara might have something to add to the conversation. Make sure the wave you want to add a contact to is open, then either:

• Click the + (plus) button at the top of the open wave and simply search for the contact you want to add. Wave autocompletes your contact search results as you type, so once it finds the person you’re looking for, you can either press Enter to add that person to the wave, or click the contact.
• Or, drag and drop anyone from the Contacts panel over to your open wave to add him or her to the conversation.

Remember, your ability to add contacts to a wave at any point in your conversation is one of the great perks of Wave. If this were an email message, you’d need to CC a new contact to pull someone else into an existing conversation, then they’d have to piece together the conversation from the bottom up. With Wave, the conversation is all laid out for your new contact, and she can even play back the wave from the beginning to catch up.

If None of Your Contacts are in Wave, Go Public!

Wave is in a limited, invitation-only preview, so there’s a good chance that the first time you log into Wave you won’t have any contacts to wave, or the person who invited you isn’t online and the wave you create seems just like a sent email. Using Wave with other users who are online at the same time as you are is the best way to understand how it works. Luckily, even if you don’t have anyone in your Contacts panel to wave real-time, you can still find and participate in public waves live any time of day or night.

Type the with:public search term into the Wave search box (located at the top of the Search panel) and press Enter to find public waves that everyone on the server can see and participate in. As you can see in Figure 2-7, this search returns a dense, moving sea of public waves that update in real-time before your eyes. If you see a wave that looks interesting, click it to join in. It opens in the third column. The with:public query returns a firehose of constantly-updating waves, and while it’s interesting to watch, you’ll have better luck finding a public wave you want to follow by adding a keyword to your public search, like with:public Firefly.

Figure 2-7. Find public conversations using the with:public search.

Once you start waving in real-time with other participants, you can’t ignore Wave’s most eye-popping feature: its ability to display multiple participants’ cursors working live in a given wave. You’ll also notice comfortable similarities between how Wave works and how your current email and instant messenger tools work.

The Initial Wave Experience

Most people’s first reaction to Wave’s real-time updating capabilities is somewhere along the lines of, “Whoah!” Watching multiple people type into a wave, live on your screen, is an exciting, new, and sometimes disorienting experience. Not only does an individual wave update before your eyes, your Inbox shifts as the waves in it change. Also, the most common first use of Wave isn’t document collaboration—it’s chat.

Watch Multiple Cursors Type into the Same Wave

The first time you’re reading or adding content to a wave at the same time one of your contacts is editing that wave, you’ll notice something interesting: Wave displays a participant’s changes to that wave in real-time, keystroke by keystroke. Within the blip, a colored cursor, labeled with the owner’s name, moves through the text as that person types, as shown in Figure 2-8. Wave can show more than one cursor working within a given wave as well. Wherever you see this cursor on your screen is exactly where that user’s cursor is on his screen. Active waves with lots of participants are a spectacle to watch, with multi-colored names typing text before your eyes.

Figure 2-8. When someone else is editing a blip, you can watch their cursor move around in real-time as they type.

Watching multiple peoples’ cursors work on a single document at the same time is a new experience for most people. As you type, you may feel self-conscious knowing that your contacts can see your every typo in real-time. It’s interesting to watch someone’s thought process unwind as they add to a conversation; it can also be a time-sucking distraction to see every keystroke as it comes over the wire, versus receiving a finished chunk of text in one shot. More usefully, seeing cursors update live helps you avoid stepping on other participants’ toes while you collaborate on a single blip.

Live, multi-user document-editing is a feature that may be familiar to programmers who’ve used a special breed of collaborative text editor, but for most of us it’s completely new, novel, and, yes, sometimes a little scary. If you never get used to the idea that someone may be watching you type—or you occasionally want the privacy of drafting a blip without someone looking over your metaphorical shoulder—Wave offers a Draft checkbox next to the Done button on every blip. The Draft checkbox isn’t available for use yet. But when Wave drafts are available, ticking that checkbox will let you complete typing a blip in private rather than displaying every keystroke as it happens. (Draft mode is one of many features that aren’t yet available in Wave.

New Message Notifications and Your Wave Inbox

Like an email client, Wave notifies you of new blips and changes in waves. In your Inbox, waves that have changed since you last looked at them display the blip subject and timestamp in bold text. Wave also highlights the number of changed, unread blips in green, as shown in Figure 2-9.

Figure 2-9 also shows that when you open an updated wave, you can identify unread or changed blips by looking for the vertical green bar in the left margin of the blip. Click an unread blip to mark it as read. The green bar fades away and the unread count changes in your Inbox.

Figure 2-9. Unread waves are indicated in the Search panel by bold text and a green callout displaying how many blips are new or have changed. Inside a wave, a green line in the left margin of a blip indicates that it’s new or has been edited.

Wave as Instant Messenger

At first, Wave can feel overwhelming, especially if you’re trying to understand it as a type of tool you already know—such as email, a document collaboration tool, or instant messenger. Wave combines features from all three of those tools. During your first few Wave sessions, most likely you’ll use Wave like an instant messenger—particularly if you start a wave with another contact who’s also online. You compose a blip, someone else replies, and pretty soon your conversation will look like a familiar, linear, IM conversation.

Figure 2-10. When you first use Wave, your instinct may be to try using it as an instant messenger.

It’s only natural that you’d use Wave like instant messenger when you’re first getting started, but you’re only scratching the surface.

On the other hand, if you’re sending messages to contacts who aren’t currently online and actively participating in the wave, Wave starts to feel a lot like email—especially if everyone replies to every blip directly after it, in a straight line. What you’ll find, however, is that the more comfortable you get with different methods of replying to and editing content in a wave, the better you’ll understand how Wave is different from email and instant messaging.

Three Ways to Update a Wave

You can update a wave in three different ways, and the method you choose varies depending on context. Sometimes you’ll want to reply directly beneath a blip in response to that whole blip; other times, you’ll want to reply to something in the midst of particularly long blip; finally, if you’re collaborating on the contents of a single blip, you’ll just edit it directly.

Reply Below a Blip

Whether you’re riding a wave with a friend or you’ve found a public wave to participate in, take a moment and read through the wave you’ve joined. See a blip you’d like to reply to? Hover your cursor over the bottom edge of any blip and a thin blue box with a blue arrow pointing down on the left appears, as shown in Figure 2-11. Click that box to reply to that individual blip. When you’re done, just click the Done button.

Figure 2-11. You can reply to any blip by mousing over its bottom edge and clicking the blue box. If you reply to a blip further up in the conversation, it appears as a nested blip.

You can reply this way below any blip, regardless of where it is in the flow of the wave. A lot of the time you’ll reply to the most recent blip at the end of a wave, but if you reply to a blip in the middle of a wave, Wave displays your reply nested between the blips before and after it.

Reply Inline within a Blip

One of the more powerful features of Wave—and one that sets it apart from email—is that you can easily reply inline to any piece of text within a blip.

To reply to text inline, double-click the last word in the section of text you want to reply to. Wave displays a small box next to the highlighted text with Reply and Edit links.

The official Wave documentation claims you should select the text you want to reply to and then double-click the selection, but that’s not quite accurate. If you select text and then double-click the selection, you’re actually just highlighting the word you double-click, and Wave sets the cursor at the end of the word you double-clicked instead of at the end of your text selection. Skip the whole selection bit and just double-click the last word in the section of text you want to reply to.

Edit the Existing Contents of a Blip

What separates Wave from email even more than inline replies is that anyone can edit any part of a wave, given permission. You may have started a blip, but any wave participant with full access can join in and edit any of the text you’ve written. (See the following section, “Wave Access Permissions,” for more on giving participants read-only or edit rights to your blips.)

• Alternately, you can double-click text—like you did when you were replying inline—but instead of clicking Reply, click the Edit button. The only real difference between starting your edit using the double-clicking method rather than the method in the previous bullet is that when you click Edit, Wave places your cursor directly at the end of the text you double-clicked.

Unlike other methods of participating in a wave, editing a blip’s existing contents does not create a new blip. There’s no outline of your text, no username displaying what text you added, and no special indentation showing an inline reply. Still, you can always tell when more than one person has edited a blip by looking at the top of the blip. Wave displays the name of every participant who’s changed that blip.

Wave Access Permissions

While Wave’s collaborative editing abilities are its strong point, sometimes you’ll want to prevent certain people (or everyone) from editing blips you create. As of writing, there are two access permission levels: Full access and Read only. As of writing, a third one, Reply-only, is forthcoming.

You can set other participants’ access permissions on waves you create. To do so, after you add a contact to your wave, click on the contact’s icon on the top of the wave.

Full Access

When a participant has full access permissions to a wave, he or she can change the contents of all blips and reply within or after blips. Full access is Wave’s default permission setting.

Read only Access

To prevent a participant from editing blips or replying in your wave, click on the participant’s icon at the top of the wave, and choose “Read only” from the drop-down on the lower right corner of the pop-up. (You can only set a participant’s access permissions on waves you have created. On waves you did not create, the drop-down will be disabled.)

If you only have read only access to a wave, the Edit button on the wave’s toolbar and the “Edit this message” option on any blips’ timestamp drop-down menu will be disabled.

Reply-only Access (Forthcoming)

As of writing, a third level of access permissions is promised but not yet available: reply-only. Given reply-only access, participants will be able to reply to blips but not edit them.

You’ve created your first wave, and you know how to contribute to a wave. Now it’s time to beef up your Wave Contacts list and set up your Wave profile to make more collaborative magic happen.

http://completewaveguide.com

Meet Google Wave

Posted by Nebojsa Skenderovic in Education      No comments

Feb
7

“What email would look like if it were invented today”

Google Wave is a group collaboration tool which makes it easy for several people to work together on a single document on the web. Google Wave combines some of the best features from modern web applications you already know and love—such as email, instant messenger, wiki’s, and forums—into a single, hybrid interface. As such, it’s difficult to describe what Google Wave is in only a few words. The Google Wave team bills Wave as “what email would look like if it were invented today.”

Why does email need a reinvention?

Relative to the lifespan of most technology, email is ancient. Invented over 40 years ago, email predates the internet as we know it—and in fact was a crucial tool in the creation of the internet. Despite its age, email hasn’t evolved much since the 1960s. Electronic mail is based on the paradigm of postal mail, a system of passing messages back and forth between senders and recipients. Wave makes a bet: surely there must be a better way to send, receive, preserve, and grow shared communiqués than via email.

Email’s Problems

Email is simple, wildly popular, and works well—or else it wouldn’t have stayed in such widespread use as long as it has. But email has serious drawbacks when used to manage a conversation within a group.

Email propagates multiple copies and versions of messages. As soon as email is sent, the message’s contents are locked in. You can only copy, paste, edit, and send on yet another copy of that message. As a result, email propagates copies of copies, storing each in a filing system of “boxes.”

There’s no standard or easy way to embed rich content like maps, photo slide shows, or video clips in the body of an email. Email’s answer for anything that’s not text is “The Attachment” or rudimentary HTML. Whether it’s a document, a photo, a video, a group survey, or a web page, email wasn’t designed to incorporate interactivity or richness within the body of the message itself. You can attach a file or include a link to a web page inside an email message. However, long links can wrap and become unclickable, and they force the recipient to launch a web browser. Further, HTML email formatting isn’t consistently supported across all email clients, and there are limitations to what you can include.

To reply to a subsection of an email, you have to quote that section manually. To reply to a certain part of a message in an email thread, you have to manually quote that section and position your cursor below it to respond—but most people don’t take the time. As a result, individual points buried inside an email’s contents can get lost and remain unaddressed, as shown in Figure 1-1.

It’s not easy to privately respond to specific people within a group email. When you’re engaged in a big group email thread, you might want to respond to a subset of the group privately. To do so via email, you have to compose yet another separate message, and manually edit the recipient list to make sure only the people you want to see the message are included on your private reply.

Since email’s invention in the 1960s, the internet and then the World Wide Web were born, which gave everyone an instant electronic printing press. In the early days, web sites were just static documents that didn’t change. As the web grew and the technology behind it progressed, web sites became interactive, ever-changing hosted applications, where you could store and update information, communicate with others, chat in real-time, and even check and send email. In a world where broadband is widely available and you can use blogs, Wikipedia, instant messenger, and hosted web applications that obviate the need for any software on your computer besides a web browser, email looks even more ancient.

While in practice Wave’s purpose isn’t a direct parallel to email’s, understanding email’s problems given the capabilities of the modern web is a good starting place for understanding what Wave can do.

Wave’s Solution: Conversations as Live Documents

Rather than pass multiple copies of messages back and forth, Wave hosts a single copy of a conversation that all participants can edit and add to. Wave displays the latest version of the conversation to everyone in the group in real-time, even as it’s changing. That means if Kaylee has the wave she sent Wash open on her computer, and Wash is typing his responses, Kaylee sees the wave change keystroke by keystroke.

Wave treats an email conversation with multiple recipients and senders as a document with multiple editors and writers. If you can make the conversations-as-documents and documents-as-conversations leap along with Wave, the system makes 100% more sense.

In other, smaller ways, Wave addresses the rest of the problems with email listed in the previous section. Using Wave, all the participants in a conversation have the ability to:

• Reply to a subset of a wave inline, as shown in Figure 1-2
• Add rich interactive media like videos, images, maps, and polls in-wave
• Play back and copy earlier versions of a wave, allowing you to revert to an older state of a given wave, or see how it changed over time
• Embed a private conversation with a subset of the group in-wave, without creating a separate thread

The following table sums up the differences between “The Email Way” and “The Wave Way.”

Wave is a big upgrade to email. But there are plenty of other real-time group collaboration tools out there, too. Let’s see how Wave stacks up against them.

Wave vs. Existing Collaboration Tools

Chances are you’re already doing the kind of online collaboration that you’d do in Wave using other products. What is it that Wave offers other solutions don’t? Well, while Wave won’t always be the right tool for the job, it does offer unique advantages over existing collaboration tools like email, instant messenger, wikis, or Google Docs.

For example, you’d choose to wave instead of email because you can have real-time, IM-like conversations inside Wave, and cut out the lag time of asynchronous email communication—you know, when you send an email and have to wait for your recipients to read, reply, and send one back. In Wave, if your recipient is online, you don’t have to wait. In fact, your recipient can start typing before you stop.

In that respect, Wave sounds a whole lot like instant messenger. However, you might choose Wave over instant messenger because in Wave, you can edit the same text, images, captions as someone else is at the same time. During an instant messenger conversation you pass back and forth a series of single-author, uneditable messages. In Wave, anyone can edit any message (or blip, in Wave-speak). Imagine correcting someone else’s typos or adding information to what they said during a chat.

Editing other people’s work while chatting sounds a whole lot like using Google Docs. Google Docs does offer a chat feature with collaborators while you edit a spreadsheet or presentation, as shown in Figure 1-3.

However, Google Docs is a web-based office suite, where the object is to create a flat file that gets printed or emailed to someone eventually. Wave is more like a real-time wiki, which creates documents meant to be linked and constantly revised, pages that contain multimedia and interactive gadgets.

Unlike most wikis and Google Docs, in Wave, you can insert image slide shows, YouTube videos, Google Maps, and countless other gadgets into a wave very easily. However, unlike Google Docs, Wave doesn’t let you export the content you create there (yet, anyway).

Feature-by-Feature Comparison

Wave is more like a real-time, workgroup Wikipedia than Google Docs, email, or instant messenger. The following table compares common collaboration tools to Wave, feature by feature.

As you can see, Wave offers a whole lot of features in one place. But how do you put Wave to good use in your workday?

What to Use Wave For

As a group collaboration tool, Wave’s primary purpose is to reduce the inefficiencies of individuals duplicating the work of their teammates, enabling people to work together simultaneously. Just a few of the best ways to use this kind of live group co-editing are:

• Taking meeting notes: Instead of one person taking meeting minutes, or everyone in the room taking their own individual notes, a group of people can edit a single wave during a meeting.
• Group brainstorming: Likewise, instead of individuals brainstorming ideas separately and then comparing notes, using a single wave gives a group the opportunity to work together and riff on each other’s ideas in real-time.
• Multimedia chat sessions: Instant messenger doesn’t usually allow chatters to include images, maps, and videos right inside their chat, and often there’s no chat transcript stored in a single place for later reference, but Wave offers both.

This is just the beginning. Throughout this book, we’ll point out examples and use cases for each Wave feature as we present it.

As you can see, Wave is an advanced tool for co-editing documents within a group. But for new users, Wave can be confusing and overwhelming.

Lost at Sea

Because Wave escapes a simple label and boasts so many advanced features, it can be confusing for new users. Parody web site EasierToUnderstandThanWave.com  jokes that heady topics like radiocarbon dating, neoclassical economics, and polymodal chromaticism are easier to understand than Wave. The joke rings true because the initial confusion about what Wave is and what to use it for is a nearly universal experience. The first waves you’re bound to receive from your friends and co-workers, fresh on Wave, will say things like “I don’t get it” and “This is weird,” as shown in Figure 1-4.

There are a few good reasons for the initial confusion.

• Conversation-as-document is a whole new paradigm with no existing precedent. For most computer users, editing a Microsoft Word document and instant messaging are two very different activities. Wave fundamentally conflates messaging and document editing, so there’s no obvious existing parallel for what you do in Wave to what you do now. It’s not quite email, and it’s not quite writing a Word document. Wave is both and neither, which can make it difficult to understand or place into your existing workflow.
• Conversation trees, or non-linear message threads, are chaotic. Forums, blog comments, email threads, and instant messaging sessions are usually linear conversations, where the newest message appears at the bottom (or top) of the list. You read them in one direction, one after the other. Wave’s inline reply capability turns a conversation into a tree that can grow any number of branches. When wave participants add new information to a wave on different branches at different times, the non-linear nature of the discussion can be overwhelming.
• Document versioning is foreign (to non-programmers). Software developers have been using file versioning tools like the one built into Wave for decades now. But most computer users don’t version their files or use a feature like Wave’s playback in any other context, so the need for it isn’t obvious.
• Wave isn’t done yet, so it has gaping holes of missing functionality. Basic functionality that you’d expect from a messaging and document editing platform are currently missing in Wave, which makes it seem less useful than doing those things “the old way.”

The confusing initial experience may thwart Wave’s adoption. Wave’s whiz-bang features are impressive, but may not be practical. Whether Wave actually gets adopted as widely as email or remains relegated to niche uses like the Segway remains to be seen.

The Story Behind Wave’s Name

Google didn’t choose Wave’s name for the reason you might assume—as a play on the idea of surfing the web. Instead its engineers were paying homage to writer and director Joss Whedon’s brief but well-loved science fiction TV series, Firefly (2002-2003), and its follow-up film, Serenity (2005). In the Firefly/Serenity universe, characters send textual communications by “wave.” References to waves appear throughout the series and include lines such as “that’s why I waved you,” “just got a wave,” “I can send him a wave,” and “I read your wave.”

In Wave’s preview release, two error messages draw from lines from the Serenity movie: “Everything’s shiny, Cap’n. Not to fret!” and “This wave is experiencing some slight turbulence, and may explode,” as shown in Figure 1-5. During Wave’s unveiling at the Google I/O conference in May of 2009, the demonstration script contained several subtle but clear references to Firefly and Serenity.

In our own homage to both Firefly and the folks who built Wave, we’ll use the Firefly universe’s characters and situations to describe usage examples throughout the book.

Google is the First Wave Provider, But Not the Last

There’s one other thing that makes Wave special: federation. Wave is designed so that any organization can set up a server, become a Wave provider, and enable their users to wave at people on other Wave providers without necessarily going through Google.

This distributed model differs from most other web applications, which usually have a single provider for all users. Google Docs, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Twitter are each offered and hosted by a single company. In those systems, all of the user data lives in a central database, which is controlled by that one company.

For example, to use Facebook, you log into Facebook.com and all your information lives in the same database as every other Facebook user, as shown in Figure 1-6.

Waves, however, can exist on servers scattered across the internet which can communicate with each other, as shown in Figure 1-7.

In the example network of Wave providers shown in Figure 1-7, the fictional mal@wave.serenity.com can wave at tracey@wave.londinium.com, even though they’re using different providers. Sihnon, Londinium, and Serenity each control and administer their own Wave server and data, independent of Google.

At this early stage, Google is the only company that is a public Wave provider. However, if Wave gets adopted more widely, there may be many Wave providers communicating with each other independent of Google, much like there are millions of email servers across the internet who are not beholden to a single company.

As of writing, it is not yet possible to send waves between different servers using the Wave preview. However, server federation is a core part of the product’s foundation and is on its way to fruition.

http://completewaveguide.com