Google Wave Checker Extension for Chrome

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.

googlechromenotifier.PNG

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

Follow, Follow, Follow, Follow the Waves You Choose

Probably the most important part of the Wave experience for new user has been the ability to search for public waves to join. Without Public Waves many people would not have enough of a network to really experience Wave in full, and the Wave community may not have grown as quickly as it has. Public Waves have allowed quick access to tips and tricks, unofficial support and general chit chat on a diverse range of topics.

The downside of this was a significant gotcha: just clicking a public wave was enough to add you to the Wave permanently and drag the wave into your inbox. From that point, your only recourse to silence the wave was to mute it (archiving only works as long as no one else contributes), and muting does not remove you from the wave.

The inability to remove yourself from a wave you have participated in is an accounting feature I guess. When the development team finally gives us the ability to remove ourselves, we still need to know which waves we have participated in.

But back to the sticky business of autofollowing public waves. What it meant was the risk of associating with Waves you never meant to follow. A misplaced click (very easy in the fast-flowing river of public waves) meant a new wave in your inbox and your face on the top of a wave. For example, clicking a wave called  “I hate my boss” immediately associated you with that wave!

Today Google have rolled out a new feature to fix this. Two new buttons now let you Follow and Unfollow a wave. When you click on an interesting public wave, you are no longer added automatically. Once you click off that wave, it will disappear into the stream and you will have no further part in it. To monitor it in your inbox/folder structure, you can now choose to follow it (using the Follow button of course), and it will move into your inbox, where you can treat it like any other wave you are in. You can move it to folders, searches will include it and it will behave like a normal wave with one key difference: you will not appear in the list of wave users at the top.

This makes a huge difference, and means that public waves now take on a sort of social networking aspect, as you can follow the information and people who interest you without being directly involved (sort of like feed readers or Twitter lists). It also improves the user experience by making public waves something you have to explicitly choose to have in your inbox.

To remove a wave from your inbox, you can simply click Unfollow and the wave will disappear as though it was never there.

Keep in mind though that the public wave behaves as it used to the second you edit it. As soon as you create or edit a blip, the wave will add you as a participant and the wave will appear in your inbox as though you had followed the wave. This makes perfect sense, as participation triggers all the accounting measures that must keep track of who made what changes. Unfollow will not remove you from the wave, it will merely be archived from view (the old Mute function).

All in all these changes are a welcome fix to one of the most vexing problems of the initial release. I look forward to seeing the other improvements as Google Wave develops!

Follow your waves - Google Wave Blog.

Expectations

Set suitable expectations. Despite the months of buzz, and blogosphere- and Twitterverse-wide clamoring for Google Wave invites, the product is still in preview and has some rough edges. Therefore, it does all parties good to be realistic, even if everybody is psyched to be the first kid on their block to use it on a live project.

6 Tips For Using Google Wave On Your First Project.

This is the first of six excellent things to keep in mind when using Wave for the first time, let alone on a project. Wave is full of potential, but people seem to forget it’s still just getting off the ground.

I love that people are using it for projects already.

Find Local Waves

By now if you’ve been using Wave long enough you should know that a search for [with:public] gets you a big long fast updating list of all the Waves that people have shared with the world. If you’ve been reading the Complete Guide to Google Wave you might know to narrow down the search with tags and terms too.

But were you aware that Local Waves have popped up everywhere as well, and you can find users near you just by plugging your city/suburb into the search (with the public wave search) eg. [with:public city name]. If you can’t immediately find a Wave for your location, you can start one! Just create a crafty title, and make the Wave public. Encourage people who join to mark themselves on a map, and shout out their Twitter/social details for people to connect elsewhere.

Have a tonne of fun, and stay safe!

Five Things to Do When You Get Google Wave

You can spend ages getting used to Wave and what it can do, and still not learn the best way. Fernando Fonseca has jotted down five things that he recommends you do when you first fire up wave, to help you break in.

<a href=“http://www.bitrebels.com/geek/dont-miss-these-5-things-about-google-wave/”>Don’t Miss These 5 Things About Google Wave! [Bit Rebels]</a>

Where to Start

Gina Trapani, Adam Pash and the Wave community have put together a short ebook on Google Wave. I’m certain as Wave becomes more complex and useful, this guide will grow and change to match. Gina and Adam are two of the cleverest technology writers on the web today, and their book is set to become one of the most authoritative documents on Google Wave.

The Complete Guide to Google Wave

3 Things you should know about Wave

I use portable Firefox for browsing at work with a modified user-agent (pretending it’s Internet Explorer, of course!) and Google Wave keeps alerting me the browser is not supported. To bypass this annoying check, go directly to https://wave.google.com/wave/?nouacheck. Of course, some browsers just can’t handle the storm: in my experience so far, Opera 10 fails to load Wave every time with a nasty error. - Fors: Shortcuts and searches in Google Wave.

gxg at FORS covers three things you should know about Wave. We’ve covered Shortcuts and useful searches already, but the information about URLs is important and useful.

One take-away from the section on searches is the reader tip published at Lifehacker about limiting waves to certain languages.

Learn these now! [Keyboard Shortcuts]

The Wave experience can quickly become frustrating as your conversations get longer. It can take a couple of mouse-clicks to reply in the middle of a blip and then again to finish the blip. If you’re constantly shifting from keyboard to mouse and back again, your productivity can quickly suffer.

But take the time to learn some of these handy shortcuts and you’ll find the user interface less baffling and the usefulness of Wave will increase (I guarantee it!). For example, you can use “Shift + Enter” to:

Reply to a message at the end of a wave. The new message will appear at the same indentation level, at the very end of the wave.

[… But also has the …]

Same function as ‘Done’ button - signifies you are finished editing your addition to a wave.
Just this one shortcut has made my experience of Wave a thousand times better. You might find something that helps you out too!

Keyboard shortcuts [Google Wave Help]

11 + 1 Google Wave Tips at Nethead

If you’re wondering where to start when you first open Google Wave, try these 11 simple tasks that will give you a feel for the interface and the design decisions that went into it. For example, Tip 7 is:

  1. Creating Folders in Google Wave allows you to create categories for your Wave documents. This is also useful to clean the Google Wave Inbox of older Waves and file the Waves documents.
    To move a Wave document to a Folder: click on a Wave document and dragdrop it to the Folder name.

Google Wave Tips

Also check out this simple tip to add video to a wave

More Wave Searches

With so much happening at once in Wave it’s easy to be overwhelmed with it all. Save yourself some grief and use these handy searches to make managing the flood easier.

Three Google Wave Searches Worth Saving [Smarterware]

Some Google Wave tools you might not know about

Some useful robots and gadgets that aren’t so well known

GO2WEB20 Blog: 11 Wave Tools You May Not Know Exist\

Lifehacker's Google Wave 101

Gina Trapani gives an overview of the things you absolutely MUST know as you dive into Google Wave

Google Wave 101 [Lifehacker]

Google Wave Terminology

A very straight-forward introduction to the slightly confusing Wave terminology.

Google Wave is coming [Juice Digital]

Google Wave Questions and Answers

Trusted tech blogger Gina Trapani tries out the Google Wave preview, and answers some questions about the service.

Google Wave Questions and Answers [Smarterware]

Hooray for On-Site Warranties

Image of a broken
        laptop

Present, originally uploaded by S Baker.

Man I love on-site warranties. Nothing beats not having to lift a finger to fix a problem that you just know would normally be a nightmare to fix.

No more frantically replacing random parts hoping and praying that it’s a part that you actually have spare. No more calls to various parts vendors for the obscure broken component, only to have to travel across town to the only place that MIGHT have it in stock. No more hunting for boxes big enough to hold the dead PC so you can ship it back to be repaired at base, only to have it returned in three weeks - just long enough to have been berated daily by the user who needs it, but not long enough to declare it legally dead and have it replaced.

Nope. On-site warranties all the way. Sure it might cost you a little more, but it’s worth it - just knowing that if something dies, it’ll be fixed by week’s end with no more than a phone call.