First look at Google Wave developer sandbox (Part 1)

Two days after I got my invitation to the Ubuntu One beta and wrote a review about my first impressions I also received an invitation to join the Google Wave developer sandbox. As my Ubuntu One review was pretty popular (had about 1k pageviews the first day – thank you dzone.com users), I decided to write something down about my first Google Wave experiences.

I will divide the review into a few separate pieces. This post will handle the general Google Wave Sandbox stuff, things I noticed when I first used the service. A second post will handle some advanced wave concepts like search, attachments, gadgets and robots. The last two posts will be about writing a gadget and a robot on the platform. I still have no idea about what kind of gadget and robot to write so if you have any suggestions/ideas, please leave a comment at the bottom of this page.

What is Google Wave

For those of you who are not familiar with Google Wave I suggest you check out wave.google.com and watch the awesome introduction as it was presented at Google I/O 2009. Basically Google Wave is a commuication and collaboration tool for the web that tries to combine emailing, instant messaging and online collaboration into waves. A wave is a kind of thread t that is shared among users. Participants in a wave can leave messages for eachother, chat IM style, share photos, play games and add gadgets (like google maps for example) or robots (automated participants with a certain functionality).

Registration

After receiving my invitation to join the Google Wave developer sandbox I had to fill out a registration form with some personal data as well as three possible nicknames. Minutes after submitting I received another email stating that my account was created with my desired username (stevenvb) along with a second account for testing purposes (stevenvb-test). The addition of a second account for testing was a nice surprise as I didn’t have any friends with accounts on the sandbox.

First login

Full of excitement I clicked the link that would take me to the sandbox. Instead of the login screen I was greeted with a simple html document that stated that Google Wave did not support my current browser (I was using Firefox 3.5.1 on a 64bit ubuntu 9.04 box). At the moment Google suggests you use either Chrome/Chromium, FF 3.0+ or safari 3.0 so I launched my Chrome development build for linux and logged in succesfully.

After the first login on both accounts I was forced to change my password to something else than the auto-generated one from the invitation and finally I got to see some Google Wave action. The first thing I did was add my test account to my contacts and ofcourse opened a wave and added my test account. I opened a second browser window to login with my test account and started sending some basic messages back and forth in the wave.

Basic usage

Simple wave editing is pretty intuitive. When you start a new wave or click the edit or reply button on an existing message the editor pops up and you are presented with a few buttons to format your text. Because I had two browser windows open side by side I could see the “update-as-you-type” feature in action. When I was typing something on one account, the other account could follow what was being typed almost character by character. In my case the message was updated about once every 2 letters. The following two screenshots demo this behaviour.

As you can see there is a Draft button available in the editor to disable this behaviour so the other participants can’t see your progress unless you click done. Unfortunately this feature is not implemented yet so the draft button is disabled.

The next morning when I logged in again I was surprised to find my inbox to be full of messages. I found this odd because except for my test account I had noone else in my contact list. After checking out some of the messages it became clear that there was an email adress (wave-discuss@wavesandbox.com) which you could add to any wave you made to make that wave publicly available to all sandbox users.

It bothered me at first to have so many unread waves all jumping up to the top of my inbox every time someone else added a new reply so I quickly discovered a solution. I added a new search with the following query “-with:wave-discuss@wavesandbox.com”. This query would give me all waves in my inbox except those with the previously mentioned public email address. By doing this I also discovered that besides the wave-discuss adress there also were some other public addresses. There also were some public waves – created by the Google devs themselves – which had info about the latest changes and bugs in them.

When checking out these “patch notes” I tried out the playback function which works really nice. This feature helped me a lot in understanding the discussions that went on. The playback function takes a wave and presents you every change step by step in chronological order. This makes browsing a wave with over 100 participants and as much replies as easy as following a thread on a discussion board.

When something goes wrong…

When something goes wrong, and it will because the software is still in its alpha stages, a textbox pops up on top of the screen in which you can type what you were doing to notify the Google devs that something has failed and they can try to fix it.

When a wave itself has some issues it will notify you with a popup on top of the wave that mentions the wave in particular has some turbulence and it advises you to reopen that wave.

In the few days that I have used Google Wave it has never made my browser crash, which is a very good thing. I had a few “Dr. wave” popups notifying me there was something wrong internally but everytime one popped up I gladly filled out the form to notify the devs about what I was doing.

Wrapping up

All in all I had a very good first experience in the Google Wave developer sandbox. There are still some features to be implemented, bugs to fix and performance tweaks to be done but it definitely looks promising. I can’t wait to start developing some gadgets and robots for this platform, which I will blog about soon so be sure to check this site for updates every now and then. My next post will be about some more advanced features of the Google Wave developer sandbox like the usage of attachments, gadgets, robots and the debug menu.

I hope some of you found this post helpful or informative. If you have any comments about this post or have suggestions about the upcoming ones please leave a comment.