Code Perspective

With Google wave being released recently to a larger and larger user base, it’s becoming a better real time collaboration tool daily. With a larger user base, also comes more and more plugins, bots, and shortcuts to save you time. I’ll go over a few aspects of Google wave that will help decrease the time you spend and increase your results.

First Off, Google wave is a team collaboration tool. By itself, to be honest, Google wave is really kinda useless. However wen used in a team environment it can be an incredibly useful tool to increase productivity and communication. The first tip I’ll give comes with a warning, because it’s not an officially supported browser this method does crash quite a bit more often than say in safari or firefox. Using an application developed by Mozilla called Prism you can actually make Google wave a desktop application to use directly from your desktop. Although you still need a solid internet connection, it can facilitate having to open a browser any time you want to wave. If you’re running Windows, you can even get prism’s Google wave icon to update how many waves have new content on them.

Widgets/Bot’s

Google Syntax highlighter – If you’re a developer this is a must. Syntax highlighting can be one in a couple ways, but as of now I’ve found that the Google Syntax highlighter to be the most stable. It supports a variety of languages and seems to embed well in most waves. The only disadvantage I’ve seen so far is if you have a ton of code to embed, the wave will significantly slow down when editing.

Multi Lingual Bot –  This bot is pretty neat,  especially if you’re dealing with a team that speaks a variety of languages. Basically, all you have to do is add the multi lingual bot to any wave. Once you have the bot added to your wave, just specify the language of your liking using the bot commands, and then voila, watch the wave being translated to the language you chose earlier.

For more information on using widgets and bots, look here.

Organizing your waves

Searches – Google wave offers the ability to perform searches, and also to save the searches. Let’s say you’re working on a project and have a bunch of waves that you want to keep organized. Whenever you create a wave for your project,  just add the name of your project as a tag for that wave. Next perform, and save a search for that tag name and then all your wave’s with that tag will then show up under the search.

Folders – Folders are locations that you can add wave’s to to keep them organized. The only downside to folders is that you cannot dynamically add items to them like you can with searches. To add a wave to a folder,  first create the wave, open the wave and then click on the “…” icon at the top right. You should see a drop down list with “Move to” option. Once you select the “Move to” option, you should see a list of folders you created there.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Spacebar – If a wave that you’re apart of is extremely long an many different people are editing it in different locations then it is extremely difficult to track what changes are happening where. The spacebar helps with that. If you’re not currently editing a wave then you can press the spacebar to scroll through the changes/replies that were made to the wave.

Control – The control key is an extremely useful key in Google wave. By pressing the control key and clicking on a wave, you can open multiple waves at exactly the same time. You can do this as many times as you want, the waves will just keep tiling in the window. Control also has some specific keyboard shortcuts that do specific features when editing a wave.

The keyboard shortcuts help list can be found here.

Summary

Google wave is an extremely useful tool when it comes to real-time team collaboration. Using it more efficiently can not only help you, but also your team.  For more information on Google wave check out Google wave help.

I recently received an invite to Google wave, so as any other anxious developer, I tried it out right away. Overall it’s great! The real-time collaboration is definitely a step forward, especially for project teams. There are also, however, a few things that I really hope Google implements soon or before the full release. I’ll go over the pros and cons from my point of view.

For those who don’t know, Google wave is a real-time collaboration tool. Unlike other real-time tools such as Etherpad, Google Wave has the ability to embed widgets into “waves”. You can use already made widgets such as syntax highlighting for code, or since wave is open source you can create your own widget. This opens Google wave to endless possibility as far a functionality goes.

Pros:

• Real Time collaboration – The ability to edit the same document in real time with team members in a project is a huge plus. And when I say real-time i mean character by character changes. For a project team of developers it’s especially useful for helping peers out with code help, or reviewing code that was written before implementation.
• Ability to embed custom widgets – Since Google Wave’s release, the amount of widgets has gone up substantially. Although there are still quite a few widgets that could be created, it’s a great start for such a new application.
• Problems – If at any point in time while “waving”, if a problem arises and Google wave is forced to close, I still have yet to lose more data than my last character typed. Good work on this one Google!
• Mute Feature – If you have a busy wave with say 75 participants, your inbox can get extremely busy very quickly with updates. A simple mute of the wave will stop those updates and keep your inbox clear.

Cons

• Settings – Google has decided that absolutely everything is done using waves. This means that changing your profile settings are also done in waves. I have to say,  I would really appreciate a section dedicated to changing your settings.
• Folder System – So far, I have found the folder system a little bit harder to use than anticipated. Sorting Wave’s become a task of adding tags to wave’s and then searching for a certain tag. I would like to see the ability to drag and drop wave’s into folders implemented in the near future.
• Group Waves – I would like to see the ability to automatically create a wave with a group of members already invited by default. This would be especially helpful with large project teams that are using wave as their main collaboration tool.

Overall I’m very impressed with Google wave and I’m excited to see the changes that will be implemented in the future. There are some things that I hope Google changes some things before launch but I’m sure they will take the feedback given and implement as many features as they can.

Cheers

Mac Life has a great video displaying some of Apple’s major releases over the years. Awesome video to watch if you’re a big mac fan!

Enjoy!

This is part 3 in a series of JQuery tutorials. I strongly recommend at least reading Part 1 before continuing with this tutorial. Part 2 is optional but would also be a great background before we get started. As for this tutorial, I will be going over creating an executing functions to make your code more efficient.

Often when writing JQuery code(especially for plugins) there are times when you need to execute the same block of code multiple times. Instead of writing them all out individually and making our code really terrible process wise, we can use functions and function calls to call the same block of code over and over.

Creating Functions

You can create a function in 2 different places. The first is in the same script tags, but not inside the document ready function. Or second, you could create a brand new script file and then reference that script file in your header. Inside this script file you could create your method and it would be able to be accessed by the main file.

To create a function, the syntax looks like this…

function nameOfFunction()
{
	//your code here
}

This tells the browser that there is a function called nameOfFunction that is not being passed any parameters. Passing parameters is something I’ll get into a little bit later. Now say you wanted to alert the user with a javascript pop-up box every time this function was run. You could add some code into the function to allow a dialog box to appear like so.

function nameOfFunction()
{
	alert("We are now alerting the user!");
}

Executing Functions

Now that we have a function created, we need to somehow call that function to execute. That’s where our javascript method calls come in. Let’s say we wanted to execute the previous function. The code would look like this.

$(document).ready(function(){
	nameOfFunction();
});

Of course this would call the function immediately after the page was ready. You can use a function call in JQuery in any function. So if you wanted to add it inside of a .click function you could do that as well. That’s all you need to do to execute functions in JQuery.

Passing Arguments to Functions

Let’s say you wanted a function to work with a piece of data from a form, but you didn’t want the function to retrieve that piece of data inside the function. You can use a piece of code called an argument to pass to the function. This allows you to pass values to a function so they can be used. To create a function with an argument then all you need to do is add the argument into the brackets in the function header. It looks like this.

function nameOfFunction(argument)
{
	//your code here
}

Now obviously since we have that argument in the argument ready to do something with it, we may also want to return a value back to the original function so that we can maybe display the result of a calculation or something like that. If we want to return a value all we have to do is insert a return value into our function.

function nameOfFunction(argument)
{
	var total = 10 + argument;
 
	return total;
}

This function will now accept a value, add 10 to that value and return it to the original function call. This way if we need to manipulate some data quite a few times, we could use a function to do that display the result.

Function Calls with Arguments

Now that we have a function made that’s accepting an argument and returning a value, we can use a function call and pass an argument to the function so it can do the calculation and we can then display the result. The function call looks something like this.

$(document).ready(function(){
	alert("The total is = " + nameOfFunction(10);
});

In our JQuery ready function we are now just displaying an alert. Inside the alert we are actually making the function call and passing a value of 10 to our function. The function is then going to add 10 to our passed argument and return a value of 20. The alert therefore is going to display – “The total is = 20″. And that’s all for basic functions and function calls.