First look on Google Wave (Part 2) : Advanced features

As the first part of my Google Wave developer sandbox review handled basic usage, this article will be about some more advanced features currently in the Google Wave developer sandbox.

Attachments

Adding attachments to a wave works similar to adding attachments to an email. You click the attachment button, select one or more files, click submit and voila. Your files are uploaded to and displayed inside the wave.

You can attach almost any filetype to a wave. In case you have one or more image files the thumbnails of these files are displayed inside the wave. When you click on a thumbnail the larger image is displayed on a dark background. When there are multiple images added to a wave you can browse them by clicking the image button at the bottom and selecting “view as slideshow”.

When uploading other filetypes, Google Wave tries to guess the contenttype of each file in order to display a fitting icon. This feature seems to work quite well. When I added a .air installation file to a wave, the wave correctly identified that file as a zip file and displayed the corresponding icon. After adding a pdf file, a preview of the file is displayed. Clicking on a non-image file in a wave results in a download of that file.

When you have the correct Gears plugin for your browser you should be able to add attachments to your waves by dragging them from your desktop into the wave. Because this feature didn’t work out of the box with any of my browsers and I didn’t have the time to figure it out, I decided to leave it for now.

Gadgets

Gadgets are small pieces of software you can attach to a wave to add custom functionality. Gadgets can be as simple as a counter that counts how many times a button has been clicked or as advanced as an embedded map displaying the current GPS location of the wave users.

The state of a gadget is shared among wave users. This means that when one user changes the state of a gadget, this change is visible for every user inside that wave. For example when a Google Maps gadget is embedded in a wave and user A is zooming in on a city, the gadget on user B’s screen will synchronize and automatically zoom in on the same city.

Adding a gadget is currently done via the debug menu. After choosing debug/extensions/add gadget, a popup is displayed with a list of available gadgets and a textbox to add custom gadgets stored somewhere on the net. Google Wave has a few default gadgets including : a chess game, a Google Maps gadget and a “Who is coming” gadget. At the moment I have not tried to add some custom gadgets yet, I will see how that goes when I write my first own gadget one of these days.

Robots

Robots are a little different from gadgets. A robot is an automated participant in a wave that interacts with it just like normal users do. You add a robot to a wave just like you would add another user. First you add the robot to your list of contacts (each robot is identified with a unique email address) and then you start a new wave with it or add it to an existing wave. Robot’s can interact with wave users in all sorts of ways. They can reply to messages, edit messages, create waves, add attachments, …

There are already quite a few nice robots out there for use with the Google Wave developer sandbox. Some of them are developed by the Google developers (Tweety – a twitter robot, Spelly – a spell checker, Stocky – a stock checker) and some other robots are developed by external developers (Roshambo – a rock paper scissors robot – is currently the only non-google robot I have tried).

Debug menu

The Google Wave developer sandbox comes with a handy debug menu. This menu has items for developers to check network information, check wave information, set the window size (not working in chrome dev build here atm) and generate/throw exceptions for debugging. At the moment also non-developers need this menu as it is the only way (that I know of) to add gadgets to a wave.

I haven’t had the chance to check out how most of these functions work as I haven’t written any code for the platform yet. Once I start developing a gadget and a robot I will probably use this menu a little bit more and have something more to say about it.

Wrapping up again

This post wasn’t very long as it was just an introduction to a few advanced concepts in the Google Wave developer sandbox. Today I will start experimenting with the gadget and robot API and in the next post I will talk about my experiences developing for the Google Wave platform. I already have an idea for the gadget but still no clue for the robot. Idea’s are suggestions are still welcome. You can leave a comment or contact me via my new contact page.