The Geekorium

Home of Rex Havoc, Space Adventurer and other assorted Geekeries.

  1. Google Wave Births “Active Robots”

    An amigurumi robot

    In my post yesterday I noted the increased push by the Wave developers to make it easier for the wave community to build and deploy extensions. It turns out this flurry of activity coincided with the imminent release of Version 2 of the Wave API, announced today.

    The first new feature is the:

    Active API: In v2, robots can now push information into waves (without having to wait to respond to a user action). This replaces the need for our deprecated cron API, as now you can update a wave when the weather changes or the stock price falls below some threshold. You can learn more in the Active API docs.
    Google Wave Developer Blog Announcement.

    More!

  2. Karma: A Way to Keep Wavers In Line?

    Here’s a neat little gadget/bot combo that could prove very useful for public waves if the system caught on.

    Add the Karma Gadget and Bot to your waves and use it to rate your users (out of five stars). If users get consistently low scores, they will be automatically kicked from Waves that choose to turn on this option.

    Karma Rating Gadget

    More!

  3. Group Waves

    Google has just unveiled their plans for group waves. The Google Wave Blog outlines the steps to set up a Google Group (yes, you have to use another tool) then add the group as a contact in Google Wave.

    The service does not yet allow you to add users by their googlewave.com account (gmail.com only), and the permissions can only be handled through the Google Groups interface. It also seems that to avoid spam (being able to send messages to an everyone in a public group at once) users must pro-actively seek out the group wave and follow it to move it to their inbox [currently waiting for confirmation of this].

    Like any Wave feature, this is still being developed and its behaviour could change over time. The Wave team have said they will continue to enhance the groups feature to make groups easier to navigate.

    Waving with groups — Google Wave Blog.

  4. 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

  5. Wave To Posterous

    Google fan Lookon has created a Bot to post to his Posterous blog, and written detailed instructions on how to do it.

    It’s straight forward enough, add the bot and log in to the form it gives you. The next time you add the bot to a wave, the first wavelet gets posted at Posterous and it returns the URL for you to check.

    Posterous seems to have the most diverse posting options of any blogging software available, and the addition of posting from waves puts it again at the forefront.

    Now the bot needs to monitor comments and return them to the original wave for even tighter integration.

    How to write a blog using Google Wave Robot for Posterous [Western Bridge over Google Wave]

    (via Kerrie Anne’s Fridge Magnets)

  7. 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

  9. Add characters quickly to a wave

    Wave has a WYSIWYG interface for styling your blips. For those of us used to working on the web however, the default Bold/Italic/Dot-point tools can leave a lot to be desired. Many wont have a character pallet handy, or remember the windows/mac keyboard codes for producing various glyphs either. But if you’ve worked on the web long enough, you might be familiar with HTML/unicode character entities such as & (&) and •

    If you need to add various characters to your waves, and are familiar with HTML entities, then the Character Entity bot might be what you need. Add [email protected] to your wave, and whenever you write a character (in the format &code;) the bot will happily convert the code into the correct characters for you.

    Here are a few to try:

    • © becomes ©
    • ↔ becomes ?
    • ∴ becomes ?

    (A more detailed list can be found at Intuitive Systems)

    Character Entity Bot [Google Code]

  10. Expecting invites to give out? This is why you might not have them

    One thing I’ve been wondering is how we’ll get the chance to invite more people to Wave. I was one of the lucky ones who got in on the first round, and had invites to share, but those I’ve invited haven’t been so lucky. Currently my invite counter is sitting at “00” too.

    As soon as we’re confident that the system can accept more users, we will add a wave to your account that allows you to nominate friends and colleagues for an account. Once you have the capability to invite people, the wave appear in your inbox.

    How do I invite people to try Google Wave? [Google Wave Help]

    So we’ll be seeing this eventually (goodness knows how it’s added — magic fairy dust perhaps), so don’t fret — All in good time!