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. Submitty and Gadgitty — Two Bots to Help Wave Developers

    Recently, the Wave Team have made a big push to publicise more bots and extensions. In a post to the Google Wave Help forum, Kylie announced that some users might start seeing a new Extensions link in their navigation panel. Then enterprising Wavers noted that anyone could get access to this Extension information with a search for [group:google-wave-extension-gallery@googlegroups.com].

    Now Google have made it easier than ever to submit an extension to the Wave Extension review team using a simple bot.

    submitty.PNG

    Create a new wave and add the Submitty bot (submitty-bot@appspot.com), and Submitty will create a submission form for you to fill out. At the bottom are a couple of checkboxes. If you check either of these boxes, you’ll be prompted to fill in more information about your bot and/or gadget. Finally, you add the Extension Review Group (google-wave-extensions-review@googlegroups.com) to your wave to submit your extension.

    More!

  3. 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!

  4. Gadget. A fun one

    Now I’m rather pleased that I can get myself around Wave, post links to my photos and generally do all the good stuff.

    There are however, people of my acquaintance who are a lot more technologically ‘ept’ (it should be a word, you know —  the opposite of inept) and have started mucking about under the bonnet of Wave.

    One of these is Dave, and the other day he introduced me to a little gadget he calls 5×5.  The object of the game is to totally fill the grid with black squares. Clicking on a square results in that square (and those around it as seen in the initial pattern below) toggling its colour. There is a solution in 14 moves.

    DavePs 5x5

    DaveP’s 5×5

    I’ll hand over to Dave to explain what it is, how it came about,  and how it works.

    5×5 is a puzzle I first saw as a DOS PC thing back in the late 1980s. I wrote my own version of it back then (just for fun) and, ever since, it’s sort of been my “try a new environment” project. I’ve written versions for DOS, Windows, OS/2, the old Palm Pilot and even for GNU emacs.

    Some time back I quickly wrote a HTML/Javascript version so, given that that’s pretty much all a Wave gadget is, I reworked it as a gadget. The main difference with this version is that it’s coded with the state of the game held in the Wave. This means that a) you can always come back to it and it’ll be how you left it and b) everyone who is part of the Wave can see what’s happening and can also make moves.

    All you have to do is use the “add a gadget” toolbar button (the one that looks like a green jigsaw) and just input this URL in the dialog that you get: http://serenity.davep.org/5×5/5×5.xml

    Hmm — the fun stuff begins!

    Oh, and PS … I couldn’t do the puzzle (/grin) not even using Wave’s fabulous “playback” feature!

  7. “Retro” Chat for Google Wave

    One of the biggest complaints from first time Google Wave users is the tidal wave of information and updates that threatens to suck their precious time away as they watch the chaos unfold.

    In a carefully tended wave, the noise and chaos are minimal, but in some of the larger (public) waves, users have given up hop of ever keeping on top of it all.

    Charles Lehner has created a simple chat gadget that might help calm the swell, by focussing some of the chat into a form most of us will recognise: IM. By introducing this gadget to a wave, you can give people an outlet to speak that brings in years of built up convention for managing the flow. People understand Instant Messaging, so you can add this gadget to bring  normalcy to the new medium.

    Perhaps you could embed this in a wave and encourage people to use it for idle chitchat, leaving the rest of the wave for the real-time collaboration on the task at hand.

    As with other gadgets the Playback function records every new person who gets to the chat, and every message, so be aware that this can blow the size of your wave recording out with a lot of extra updates to wade through if necessary.

    “Retro” Chat for Google Wave [Wave Samples Gallery]

  8. Twitter on Wave

    I should preface this post with an introduction.

    I’m Cathie and I am the “bloody end user” component of this blogging team.  We figured that if Wave is going to be the ubiquitous thing that Google envisages, it will have to be workable by everyone — not just the more “savvy” of those amongst us.

    So what I’ll be doing is coming at Wave from my perspective — perhaps not such a big picture view — but a fingers on keyboard aspect.

    Okay … so one of the first things I looked for once I had my Wave account was a Twitter interface thingamabobby!

    I found two — the first was clunky and ugly — but the second works a treat.  It’s by TwitterGadget.com

    To set it up …

    Open a new wave, and click on the green blobby thing which allows you to add a gadget by url and paste the following url.

    http://www.twittergadget.com/gadget_gmail.xml

    This will then take you through to Twitter to allow access — and then this tidy little interface appears in your wave!

    twitterapp.png

  9. Embed and Extend

    The Google Wave APIs come in two flavors: Embed and Extensions. With Embed, you’re able to bring waves into your own site through a simple JavaScript API. For example, embedding a wave in a webpage is a good way to encourage a discussion among the visitors. With Extensions, you’re able to write programs, which are packaged as Robots or Gadgets, that provide rich functionality inside the Google Wave web client.

    Introducing the Google Wave APIs

  10. Wave the Platform

    This is Google Wave as a Platform, one of the “Three Ps” of the Wave. The API gives developers a way to plug in to the Wave product and offer new and interesting ways of using waves. For instance at the preview, a software robot developed using the API could be added to a conversation to translate your waves in real-time into other languages.

    I’ll be covering more of the ways the API can be used in later posts, but for now I’ll say it’s powerful way to make an already compelling product even more useful.

    Google wants developers creating value to add to their product on day one. Hopefully someone enterprising will use the API to bridge the gap between email and waves unless Google does it first.