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