Wave so far

[aesmael]

Originally published at a denizen's entertainment. You can comment here or there.

The preview of Wave I had requested access to did not arrive until late November, and I did not begin using it until early December as I was busy writing previously. I have made a point of using it often since then and so far I am liking it a lot.

Wave seems very useful for the purposes I have been wanting to put it to, working on collaborative fiction projects or for small editorial review of public writings like this one. So far this has been encouraging and I have been experimenting with new ways of organising my ideas, as well as being for me quite productive. So, pending the participation of other people, Wave is already succeeding at everything I wanted out of it, except that I have not yet been able to try it for role-playing gaming.

I do have some complaints or frustrations so far though. Right now I am using Chrome because the main wave I was editing was too jittery in Firefox for me to even get the cursor to where I wanted it or, when I finally managed that, to see what I was doing - with every character typed the view would jump to the bottom or the top of the wave or sometimes to actually show where I was working, though this was rare and seldom persistent.

Whenever I experience issues like that where a Google product has problems on Firefox but not on Chrome I tend to suspect Google of discreetly encouraging use of their browser over others especially if it used to work fine. But Wave at least is still in experimental stages and for others I have not ruled out some odd interaction with extensions in Firefox, something I should really test more thoroughly, so that could well be only a product of my regular cynicism toward business.

I would also like to be able to have more than one wave open at a time, since although I tend to give primary focus to one thing I am working on I tend to be inspired to make smaller tweaks to other projects at the same time. This is something I value about tabbed editors like Notepad++, although as a complaint it may have more to do with my connection speed being currently very slowed, making quick switches between documents online a hassle, although I do think I would rather not close something I am actively working on just to add a couple of lines to something else.

Otherwise I am quite happy with Wave so far. I think it does everything I was wanting out of it.

Since it is being promoted as an alternative communication tool to email, one that will be available to non-Google entities to provide in the future also, I am finding myself preferring to refer to it as Wave rather than Google Wave for now. They have already anyway assured themselves market dominance through this period of exclusivity I think.

I suspect Google is not going to be creating a desktop client since they would rather people use their browser, although someone else might make one, and I expect once out of preview there will be a Wave app added to Google apps.

Comments

[achernow.livejournal.com]

I haven't quite found a usefulness of Google Wave yet.

Right now I am using Chrome because the main wave I was editing was too jittery in Firefox for me to even get the cursor to where I wanted it or, when I finally managed that, to see what I was doing - with every character typed the view would jump to the bottom or the top of the wave or sometimes to actually show where I was working, though this was rare and seldom persistent.

Actually... you're not the first to complain about that. I've been using Safari to get into Wave. (Of course, I do use Safari normally anyway, but still.) It's the same rendering engine as Chrome, so no surprise that it works well with Wave.

But still... I haven't quite all figured out what the usefulness of it is.