The Geekorium

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

Take the URL http://antimatter15.com/misc/read/? and tack on the wave ID you want to publish, and BAM! a simple published wave. For example: “Things to do in Adelaide”, a wave put together by Taryn Hicks. It’s shiny and blue, and the information is easy to read without needing a Wave account. In addition the creator has made it possible to publish a private wave, simply by adding the gwavereader@googlewave.com bot to the wave!

A tool like this should be an official feature of Google Wave. One of my biggest concerns is that as wave becomes more popular, people will begin to publish tonnes of handy information as waves only (this has already begun). The problem with the current embedding tools are that they require the reader to have a Wave account, and just as importantly a browser that can handle Wave. Sadly this is the opposite of the open and free web the founders of the Internet envisioned. But with tools like the Wave Reader, we’re on the way to getting simple, clean HTML pages of information the way we’re accustomed to. To generate some clean HTML you can use to make a totally static page out of a wave, add &html=0 to the URL.

So head over to the Art of Wave Reader to get a good idea of how to use the tool and pick up a bookmarklet that will open your current wave in Wave Reader. You can also download the code. You may notice it’s now up to version 5.2 (the blog post was about 4.6) and is a marked improvement from even a week ago, now making extensive use of HTML5 and CSS3. Wave Reader is released under a GNU General Public Licence v3.

I can’t recommend Wave Reader highly enough and wish a feature like this was baked into wave. It’s fast, good looking, and very useful.

If like me you find Chrome gives you the most stable, enjoyable experience of Google Wave, you might also be pining for the notifier extension Firefox users get.

Well now Chrome has a neat little extension that does the same thing. Jeremy Selier has built a neat little plugin that shows you how many unread waves you have in your inbox. It checks every thirty minutes by default (at the request of the Wave team), but you can set it to check more frequently in the extension options.

Something that makes a sound, or pops up a notification box (Growl-style) would be even more useful in some circumstances (Firefox is still my main browser of choice). However, if you need a simple way to see new Wave activity without checking the window every couple of minutes, this might just be the thing.

Chrome Extension - Google Wave Checker

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Google Wave Add-on for Firefox at That Smith

The first of Google Wave’s “Three Ps” announced at the Google I/O Developer Conference was Google Wave the Product.

As previously mentioned, Google’s Wave product is a re-invention of our traditional web communications. It combines elements of email, instant messaging, and real-time collaboration in a completely new way. It is set to become a replacement or alternative to their Gmail and Gtalk products, but contains a lot more.

The distinction of the Google Wave product is that it will run on Google’s servers, using Google’s bandwidth, and have all their weight behind it, driving it. It might also mean it will include their advertising, and the more paranoid among us might think it has the downside of running on their infrastructure.

It is more than likely they will offer free and paid plans similar to those they offer Google Apps users. It will come default with a select set of features such as the inline spell checker/corrector, and translation robot. “Wave the Product” is the obvious public face of Google Wave, and the way Google will monetise their invention.

For those that want more Google offers Wave the Platform