STOP! Waving time...

Over the last few months, I've seen a surprising number of time-related extensions popping up in our gallery - timers, stopwatches, countdowns, and the like. I think it's because 1) many people use Wave to interact with folks from different timezones, and 2) many people use Wave during meetings... and many people don't like meetings to go over time. :)

Whatever the reasons may be, it's a good thing for all of us, as these extensions come in handy in a variety of situations.

For example, the Remaining Time gadget is a favorite of mine. Its simple interface lets you specify an event name and an event time, and then it countdowns to that time.

We first used this gadget in the Google I/O 2010 conference session waves to show the countdown until the start of the talk. We did this because many developers were eager to watch the live notes for a session from afar, but they couldn't easily convert from the San Francisco time listed into their own local time. By including a countdown, they could look at the remaining time and instantly know when to return to the wave.

More recently, in our local Google DevFest AU conference, I used the gadget to let speakers know how much time they have left to present. I set up a laptop in front of the speakers, created a wave with the gadget in it,and set it to countdown until the end of their talk. By using a wave instead of a desktop app, I could modify the wave from my comfortable seat in the back if I wanted to give them more time or send them a message.

Besides the "remaining time" gadget, you might also check out these time-related extensions:

• Time-me: Gives you all the basic functionality of a stopwatch - start, stop, and split, but since it's in Wave, anyone can do those actions, and it shows the usernames for each split.

• Time-Manager: Lets you start and stop counting time, and shows the total time counted. The developer created it because he loves the similar functionality in Basecamp ® for tracking the amount of time spent on tasks and wanted to bring that to Wave.

• Local time gadget: Lets you specify a time in your locale and converts that time to the local time of whoever's viewing it. It was created by a gamer in the US who schedules gaming sessions for him and his friends in wave, and he wanted to make it easy for them to see the local time for each session.

• Deadline gadget: Similar to the gadget I described above, this one lets you specify a end time and shows the remaining days, hours, and minutes. This one is designed specifically for visualizing task deadlines, like when a blog post should be completed, and lets you check off the task when done.

Wave on!

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations, Google Wave Team

More domain-level controls for Google Wave

Today on the Google Enterprise blog, we announced that we're beginning to roll out user policy management, which will allow Google Apps Premier and Education Edition customers to customize which users in their domains have access to each application in the suite.

One of the top-requested features from businesses and schools who want to try out Google Wave is the ability to pilot the application with a subset of users. With this new feature, Google Apps admins can now start by enabling Wave for a group of advance testers. For example, at a K-12 school, admins can now enable the service for just teachers and older students, or a large enterprise can turn it on for a specific project group first.



If you're already a Google Apps Premier or Education Edition admin, you'll start seeing the 'Organizations & users' tab in the control panel over the next week. And to learn more about Google Wave for your domain, visit http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/wave.html.

Wave on!

Posted by Greg D'Alesandre, Product Manager, Google Wave Team

Waves Down Under-er

Just before the December holidays, a few Google Wave team members were playing foosball and decided we needed to do something fun together. Since Australia is a bit warm that time of year, we figured why not go to Antarctica? Time was short, so we had to get our plan together quickly. From using Wave at work, we had found that it is great for coordinating with small groups of people, so naturally, we decided to use it to plan our trip. We needed to find a cruise, decide on a date, figure out who wanted to go, work out cabin arrangements, get some flights, equipment, camera gear, and try not to get seasick. All in just in three weeks!

First, we had to decide which cruise to take, so we started a planning wave. Greg began by itemising upcoming cruises from a couple of potential operators, listing out dates, routes, and activities. Many of us were keen to kayak in the icy Antarctic waters, so we eventually settled on an eleven-day cruise with a provider from Canada.

Next, we managed the tricky task of choosing sleeping arrangements with a poll gadget in our planning wave. Each person indicated their cabin type preferences, and luckily, a single arrangement fell out of those choices. You can see our votes in the wave (try 'Playback' to see how the discussion evolved).

Then we began the ever-popular tasks of booking flights and accomodation and sorting out what to bring. We decided to divide up the responsibility: Narelle and Alex researched flights, Pat called Argentinian hotels, and Jan looked into the administrivia of visas, immunisations, and equipment (cameras!). Greg ... supervised.

Whenever someone found new information, he or she summarised it in our wave and we discussed the options right there, as a group. Within a day or two our arrangements were complete, and earlier discussions in the wave were replaced with final information such as flight numbers, booking numbers and costs.


A great advantage of planning everything in Google Wave is that the wave always presents a definitive view of the latest information and decisions. It didn't matter if some people missed parts of the discussion, because they could use playback to easily catch up with the decisions or see how the discussion evolved. Once a decision was made, we deleted the discussion and replaced it with the final plan. This meant the wave only displayed the most up-to-date, important information.

If we hadn't used Google Wave, we might have been able to pull the trip together in time, but we're not sure we would have still liked eachother enough to actually enjoy our time trapped on a boat together. Wave helped us pull all our information together into one place, make decisions quickly, and have a record of those decisions for when someone changed their mind. So the next time you want to get out and explore the world with a few friends, (or even colleagues!), give Wave a try.


You can check out some of our photos from the trip. Oh, and we figured as long we were standing on the southernmost continent, we should film Dr. Wave in his unnatural habitat. In fact this was an excuse to put him on the edge of a cliff and throw snowballs at him. Enjoy!

And here's a re-enactment of the wave we used to plan the trip:

Posted by Alex, Jan, Pat, Narelle and Greg, Google Wave Team

Embedding UStream & Wave = Live video + live typing, together at last

Over the course of the last week, we held 5 days of mini-conferences on different Google developer technologies in the Google Sydney office. Since some developers couldn't get time off work (or life :)) to come to the event in person, I wanted to make it possible for them to participate virtually.

So, I setup a Ustream channel for the event, powered by a sleuth webcam in the front row of the audience, and also set up a backchannel discussion wave for each day of the event. Both the Ustream video player and Google Wave are embeddable, so I could combine the two on the same page - like this one for the Chrome & OpenWeb day. To make that page, I just grabbed the embed code on the UStream channel page, generated the embed code from the Wave Web element page -- enabling the header/footer options to make the "Next unread message" button visible -- and pasted them into a simple HTML page.



The great thing about using an embedded wave is that some folks (the virtual ones) can interact with it via the Ustream page, and other folks (the live audience members) can do the same by logging into their Google Wave account. Using a wave also meant we could easily have multiple conversations at the same time and pull in multimedia, like when I used the HTML gadget to play around with the HTML elements on the slides.

To try it for your next conference, class or virtual get together, follow these step-by-step instructions:

1. Visit the channel page, like http://www.ustream.tv/channel/devfest-au

2. Click "embed codes" on the top right of the video player.

3. Copy the "Live show" code.

4. Paste it into an HTML webpage.

5. Visit the wave. Copy the URL in the browser bar or in the "Link to this page" dialog.

6. Visit the Wave web element page (http://www.google.com/webelements/wave/). Paste the URL into that page.

7. Copy the generated code into your HTML page.

8. To align the wave next to the ustream, like in my example, wrap both of them in a div with style "float:left".

.. enjoy the live-ness!


Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations, Google Wave Team