From The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave

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You've created and participated in waves, filled in your Contacts list, and saved reusable searches for waves. Now it's time to dig into Wave's advanced features.

Google Wave is fundamentally a document-centric system, so you want to make good-looking waves with colors, font faces of your choice, headings, and other word processor-like styles. You can enhance your waves even more by adding links and YouTube videos, attaching files and creating photo slide shows, and by adding interactive gadgets like maps and Yes/No/Maybe multiple choice responses.

This chapter also describes other advanced features, like how to spell check waves, copy waves, play back wave revisions, make a wave public, and send a private reply.

By the end of this chapter, you will have graduated from a beginner to a competent Wave user.

Contents

Format Your Waves

Wave offers light, word processor-like document formatting such as font faces, colors, headers, and bullet points to make your waves more readable and professional. When you're composing or editing a wave, select the text you want to format and use the edit toolbar buttons shown in Figure 5-1. Keep in mind that toolbar buttons can get cut off if your wave is in a narrow area. If that happens, click the ... (ellipses) button to expand the rest of the buttons into a drop-down menu.

Reminder: A wave's toolbar has different buttons on it when you're viewing the wave versus when you're editing it. Make sure you're in edit mode to use text formatting features from the toolbar. With the wave open, select the blip you want to edit, and either click the blip's timestamp drop-down menu and select Edit this message, or press the Ctrl+E keyboard shortcut to switch to edit mode.


Figure 5-1 shows a wave's edit toolbar, and examples of Wave's text formatting abilities. From left to right, a wave's edit toolbar buttons let you:

  • Bold, italicize, underline, and strike through text
  • Select one of 14 font families (from Arial to Verdana)
  • Assign a text color or a highlight (behind-the-text) color
  • Choose one of four heading levels (of various sizes) or the default text size
  • Create a bulleted list
  • Indent or outdent paragraphs, and align text left, right, or center
Figure 5-1. Wave offers several rich text editor controls to format the contents of your wave.

The rest of the edit toolbar's buttons, from the Link button on, insert various types of interactive content to your wave.

Insert Links into Waves

Figure 5-2. Select the text you want to link, click the Link button on the toolbar, and enter the page's URL into the pop-up.
To add a link to a web page in your blip, select the text you want to link. Then, click the toolbar's Link button (or press Ctrl+K, as listed in the wave editing shortcuts table in Chapter 6, Master Wave's Interface). In the pop-up, enter the web page address in the URL or Wave ID field, as shown in Figure 5-2.

Not only can you link to external web sites in a wave, you can also link to other waves, wiki-style. While technically you can enter a Wave's ID into the URL or Wave ID field shown in Figure 5-2, extracting a Wave ID is not an intuitive process. There's a much easier way: first, while you're editing your wave, search for the wave you want to link to in the Search panel. Then, drag and drop it into the wave that you're editing to add the link.[1] Remember that participants in your wave can open the linked wave only if they're participants in it as well. When others click the link to the wave, it opens in the current wave panel.

Tip: You can find all waves that link to a certain web site, like completewaveguide.com using the search operator link:completewaveguide.com.


Add Links, Images, and YouTube Clips Directly from Google Search Results

Figure 5-3. After you insert a video search result into your wave, click the lightbulb icon next to it and choose Embed video to include a full player.
Another way to add links and other web content to waves is via a Google search panel built into Wave. Click the blue G+ button on a wave's toolbar. From the pop-up, you can search the web for regular pages, images, and video clips. Click the tab to specify the type of content you want, enter your search terms, and press Enter. The results appear in the panel, each with an Add to wave link next to them. Click Add to wave for the desired results to insert them into your wave.
For Example: If you're researching a particular topic—whether it's to write a blog post, a presentation, or plan a vacation—you want to gather all the links, images, and videos that are most relevant into a single wave. Using the Google search panel is the fastest way to quickly assemble that kind of media into one place, because you don't have to upload or manually insert links or video embed code into the wave. All you have to do is click Add to wave on the best results.


Web page links show up as plain links. Images appear as thumbnails in your wave. Video results can appear as either a link to the video, or, with an extra click, an embedded video player.

To include a video player in your wave, while you're editing it, click the G+ button, then click the Video tab and search for "Serenity trailer." You'll get several results for the film trailer on YouTube. Click Add to Wave on the video of your choice. Initially it appears as a link with a small lightbulb icon next to it. Click the lightbulb and select Embed video from the drop-down menu to place the full YouTube player inside the wave, as shown in Figure 5-3.

This embedded video player is the first example we've seen of a Wave gadget: an interactive bit of web content in-wave. (This chapter describes built-in gadgets in the section titled "Add Built-in Gadgets to Your Waves," or you can become a Wave gadget expert by reading Chapter 7, Wave Gadgets.)

Remove an embedded video player from your wave the way you do any gadget: in edit mode, hover over the player to display its drop-down menu in the upper-right corner, and then select Delete. (But see the "gotcha" mentioned in the upcoming "The Maps Gadget" section.)

Attach Files to Your Waves

Like email, you can attach files to your waves, including images. There are two ways to add a file or image to a wave:

  • If your browser has the Google Gears plug-in installed, you can drag and drop files from your computer directly into your wave. (Gears comes with Google Chrome for Windows, and it's freely available to install for Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari for Mac.)
  • Or, click the paper clip icon on your wave's toolbar, and then select the file you want to upload using the Open Files dialog box.

Except for images, most file types appear in the wave as an attachment, represented by a large icon. Figure 5-4 shows what a spreadsheet, Microsoft Word (.doc) file, a PDF, and a regular image look like as file attachments in wave.

Figure 5-4. File attachments appear as thumbnails in-wave. PDF and image files display previews of their contents, while other file types (like Word or Excel documents) appear as generic attachment icons.

By default, images appear as framed thumbnails when you upload them to a wave. To expand an image to its full size and remove the frame, while you're in edit mode, hover over the image thumbnail. A small gray arrow pointing right will appear on the top right corner of the image. Click it to display the photo in-wave at full size, as shown in Figure 5-5.

Figure 5-5. The first image is the default thumbnail, on the second you can see the small arrow which would expand the thumbnail to full size, and the third is an expanded image.

Whether it's an image or another kind of file, every file type has a caption or descriptive text included with it. By default, it's the name of the file without the extension. Anyone participating in the wave can edit that caption, but it does not change the file name. If you click a file to download it, the downloaded file name will be the original name the file had when it was uploaded, not the edited caption.

Google limits file attachments to 20MB in size. Additionally, uploaded photos may lose quality. According to Google Wave's help section:[2]

All photos you upload will be downsampled—downsampling is the process of making a digital image smaller by removing pixels. Waves containing large files tend to load more slowly, so we've implemented this process in an effort to keep Google Wave nice and speedy.

This means that Wave isn't suited for exchanging high-resolution photos or hosting large files. However, Wave positions itself as a photo-sharing tool for viewing web-quality photos online. It offers the benefit of collaborative photo captions and a sleek slide show for viewing photo collections.[3]

Share Photo Collections in Wave

One big advantages of sharing photos with others in Wave is the ability to collaborate on photo captions. Another is the ability for anyone to add photos to a single wave. Rather than several people uploading separate albums of photos to different services after an event, everyone in the group can add images to a single wave. Like edits to regular wave text, caption updates and photo uploads happen real-time, and you can watch wave participants make them live.

For example: After a wedding, if both sides of the family add all their photos to a shared wave, different family members can add the names of who appeared in each photo to the captions, depending on who knows who.


Once photo captions are set, you can view a set of photos in-wave as a slide show.

Play a Photo Slide Show in Wave

When you add photos to a wave, their thumbnails appear in-wave, much like the thumbnail view in Mac's Finder or Windows Explorer. When you're done editing the wave, you can click an image to view it at its full size. Wave's background color goes black, and the full-sized image appears mid-screen. Click the white X in the upper-right corner to close the image.

If you have multiple images in a wave, an Images button appears next to the Files button at the bottom of that wave. Click the Images button and select View as slide show to easily flip through the photos at their full sizes, as shown in Figure 5-6.

Figure 5-6. When there are multiple images in a wave, click the Images button at the bottom of the wave and select View as slide show from the menu to play an auto-forwarding slide show of the images.

In slide show mode, image thumbnails appear at the bottom of the screen. You can click the Play button on the left to move through the images automatically. Alternately, you can click a thumbnail to see it full size, or use your arrow keys to move forward or back through the slide show. In slide show mode, you cannot see wave text or edit photo captions. To exit the slide show, click the white X in the upper-right corner of the slide show.

A slide show isn't the only kind of rich, custom content you can add to your wave.

Add Built-in Gadgets to Your Waves

A Wave gadget is a custom interactive control you can add to your waves. Anyone can create gadgets that do a variety of things, and you can install the gadgets you want to use. Chapter 7, Wave Gadgets, covers how to install gadgets and some of the best third-party gadgets worth checking out. To get started using gadgets, there are two useful default gadgets built into Wave: the Maps gadget and the Yes/No/Maybe gadget.

The Maps Gadget: Watch Your Collaborators Zoom and Pan Real-time

The lead engineers who built Google Wave are the same engineers who built Google Maps—so it's no surprise that Wave has an excellent Google Maps gadget that puts an interactive map in your wave. On this embedded map you can pan and zoom, add points to locations, draw lines from one location to another, and fill polygons to highlight areas on the map. In edit mode, as you zoom, pan, draw, and switch between Map, Satellite, and Hybrid mode, if your wave's participants are online and have your map wave open, they'll see those changes as you make them live.

To add a map to a wave, while you're editing the wave, click the Maps gadget button (the red pinpoint) on the toolbar. A map of your location's general area appears in-wave. To find a specific address or location, search Google Maps by using the search box at the bottom of the Maps gadget. Click a result, and then add that pinpoint to your map by clicking the Create copy on map button, as shown in Figure 5-7.

Figure 5-7. To add a point to your map, search for a location, click the desired result, and then click the Create copy on map button.

You can also add location markers to the map by hand. In edit mode, zoom and pan to the location you want to point out, and click to add a marker there. Set the title and description in the pop-up box. Your map can include as many location markers as you want.

The Maps gadget also lets you add lines and filled polygons to your map. Click the Line and Polygon buttons to the right of the search box at the bottom of the Maps gadget while you're in edit mode. Then click the map to start drawing. The Hand button switches you back into pan and zoom mode.

When you're finished adding information to your map, zoom and pan to the area you want your collaborators to see when they open the wave, and select Map, Satellite, or Hybrid mode. Then click the Done button (or press Shift+Enter) to save your changes. This is the state that the wave's participants will see the map in. While they're viewing the map, they can zoom and pan to see other parts of the map and you will not see that activity. (A Return to shared view button lets you or the wave's other participants snap back to the saved, shared state of the map.) If a participant switches into wave edit mode and changes the state of the map, draws on it, or adds markers, the rest of the participants can see that activity real-time.

To delete the Maps gadget, make sure you're in edit mode, and then hover your pointer over the gadget. From the drop-down menu that appears in the gadget's upper-right corner, select Delete.

Gotcha: If you add a gadget to a blip and then close the wave, when you re-enter edit mode for that blip, the gadget drop-down menu may not appear when it should. Chalk this up to a glitch in the Wave preview.


The Yes/No/Maybe Gadget

The Yes/No/Maybe gadget helps you survey a group and tally responses to a simple question, such as "Will you make it to the party?" To add the Yes/No/Maybe gadget to your wave, click its button on the toolbar. (It appears to the left of the Maps gadget button, and its icon contains three small boxes colored green, red, and yellow.) Above the gadget, type your question. When you're done editing the wave, add your participants to it.

To respond to the question, you and your participants click either Yes, No, or Maybe at the top of the gadget. When you do, your user icon appears in the appropriate column, and the gadget automatically tallies the total responses for each, as shown in Figure 5-8. To add a note to your response, click the Set my status link. That text appears next to your name in the response. You can change your response by clicking a different answer.

Figure 5-8. The Yes/No/Maybe gadget tallies the responses to a question in columns.

To delete the Yes/No/Maybe gadget, make sure you're in edit mode, and then hover over the gadget. From the drop-down menu that appears in the gadget's upper-right corner, select Delete. (But see the "gotcha" mentioned in the previous "The Maps Gadget" section.)

Spell Check Your Waves

Wave includes an automatic spell check feature that overrides any spell checker available in your web browser. As you type in Wave, misspelled words appear with a red underline. To correct the spelling, hover over the underlined word and click the drop-down menu that appears. Select the corrected spelling in the list, as shown in Figure 5-9.[4]

Figure 5-9. Wave's built-in spell checker suggests corrections to misspelled words in a drop-down menu.

If the word is spelled just how you intended, you can ignore the red underline. Alternately, select the correct spelling from the bottom of the suggestion drop-down menu.

Tip: Press Ctrl+Spacebar+arrow keys (Cmd+Spacebar+arrow keys for Mac users) to quickly move to the next red underlined word. Press the up and down arrows to move through spelling suggestions; press Enter to accept one.[5]


Wave's interface is available in U.S. English only. However, the spell checker understands and offers correction suggestions in more languages[6] than just U.S. English, including Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.

Copy Waves

One of the main advantages of using Wave over email is that Wave doesn't create multiple copies of a message as a byproduct of its usage—everyone included in the conversation updates it in a single place. However, there may be cases where you do want to make copies of waves, to share with different groups of people. It's easy to do just that.

To copy a wave, click any blip's timestamp drop-down menu and select Copy to new wave. Only the contents of the blip you copied get transferred into the new wave; none of its replies or past revisions are included.

For example: If your team is creating a document to present to the boss eventually, you might not want the boss to see the wave's past versions, or inline discussion blips. Once the wave is complete, you can copy it to a new, final wave, and add the boss to that one.


Further, if you have read only access to a wave you'd like to use and edit for your own purposes—like a wave template—use the Copy to new wave feature to do so. See Chapter 10's "Create Wave Templates for Reuse" section for more.

Play Back Wave Changes Over Time

One of Wave's most powerful features is its ability to replay the entire history of a wave's changes from creation to its current state. Every time you click the Done button (or press Shift+Enter) to complete an update or reply to a wave, Wave saves a snapshot of the document state. That version of the wave appears as one frame in its playback.

To play back a wave, open it in view mode, and then click its Playback button. A slider appears at the top of the wave, with rewind, back, forward, and fast-forward buttons on its left. Just beneath the slider, a yellow bar tells you when the wave was created, and how many revisions there are (as well as which one you're looking at). For example, if you click the Playback button in a wave that you created on October 1st that has 33 revisions, the yellow bar reads, "You started the wave on Oct 1" on the left, and "1 of 33" on the right, because you're viewing the first of 33 revisions.

To navigate between versions in playback mode, use the buttons on the left of the slider or the slider itself. Move one revision forward or back using the middle two buttons, and fast-forward or rewind to the beginning or end of a wave's history with the outer buttons. As you move through its versions, changes to the wave from the previous version are highlighted in yellow and red text, as shown in Figure 5-10.

Figure 5-10. When you play back a wave's edit history, you can see added text in yellow, and deletions struck through with a red background.

To restore a wave to a past version of itself, use the slider to navigate to the desired revision, and click on the Restore button.

Playback is an advanced feature for power users—it is familiar to software developers who use version control systems—but there are two everyday use cases for it.

Playback Use Case: Conversational Catch-up

Playback's main purpose is to help Johnny-come-latelies catch up on what they missed when they've been added to a wave after it's progressed through multiple changes. For example, if three co-workers are collaborating on a wave, and then add a fourth person to it, that last person is coming in on a fully developed conversation or document. To catch up with what happened in sequence, Wave's playback functions as an instant replay. The fourth person can go back to what the wave looked like when it started, and watch what changes and contributions got added to it over time to see the flow of the conversation as it happened.

Playback Use Case: Clean Up Wave Vandalism

The ability to restore a wave to a previous version means you can easily undo unwanted changes, like vandalism on a public or group wave. If a participant has made unwanted edits to a wave, use playback and its Restore button to roll the wave back. Then, if you're the wave owner and you want to prevent that person from editing the wave again, change his or her wave access to "Read only," as described in Chapter 2's "Wave Access Permissions" section.

Make a Wave Public

Instead of adding participants to your wave one by one, you can make a wave accessible to everyone on your Wave provider's server by making it public. To make a wave public, there's no one-click button; instead, there's a trick. Add the easypublic@appspot.com Wave ID to your Contacts list. Easy Public is a bot that will do the work of making your wave public for you. You'll learn more about Wave bots in Chapter 8.

Once the Easy Public bot is in your contacts, to make any wave public, add it as a participant. You'll notice that Easy Public adds a special public group as a participant on the wave. This means your wave will now appear in search results for with:public.

Gotcha: Once you make a wave public, it cannot be undone, even if you remove the Easy Public bot. Be careful that you don't make sensitive waves public by accident.


Be prepared: Public waves can accumulate a large number of blips (into the hundreds), and as a result, become unusable. When you try to open a very active wave with more than a hundred blips, Wave is more likely to throw an error message. If you do get the wave open, playback isn't likely to work correctly, especially if participants have added bots and gadgets, which can slow things down. People searching for public waves, especially at this early point in Wave's roll-out, often haven't been in Wave long enough to know what's good Wave etiquette and what's not, and things turn into a free-for-all. If you want your public wave to stay useful and intact for long, you'll have to look after it, garden off-topic blips, delete slow or broken gadgets, and remove unwanted bots. Chapter 9 goes into more detail about looking after active waves in its "Gardening Your Waves" section.

Send a Reply Only Certain People Can See

Figure 5-11. To send a private message to some but not all participants on a certain wave, from the timestamp drop-down menu, select Private reply.

A group of friends are going to a movie that you're not interested in, and you want to ask one friend in the group if she wants to do something else with you—without letting the rest of the group see your conversation. In Wave, you can send a reply within a large wave that only certain people can see.

To send a private reply, click a blip's timestamp drop-down menu and select Private reply, as shown in Figure 5-11. A new, inline blip with an additional blue heading that contains its participants appears inline. Type your private message, and then add the people you want to include in the usual way. If someone is a participant in the parent wave but not the private reply, he or she cannot see the reply.

Gotcha: As of writing, once you create a private reply, you cannot remove it from a wave. You can edit or delete its contents, but that big blue heading stays within the flow of the wave. Presumably once you can truly delete all waves, you'll be able to delete private replies as well.


Another less obvious use of the private reply is annotating a wave for your own purposes, essentially leaving a "note to self" that you don't want to share with others.

For example: You're using Wave to collaborate on meeting notes with your co-workers, and you want to jot a note to yourself to follow up on something that came up in the meeting privately. Create a private reply, add your text, and don't add any other participants. Later, you can search for and see that "Note to self" in-wave, but your co-workers won't.


Publish a Wave on Your Web Site

Even at this early stage in its development, you're not limited to only accessing your waves at wave.google.com. Wave offers the ability to embed waves on any web page where wavers can edit and interact with its contents, and all those changes appear in the rest of the participants' Wave Inbox.

The process of publishing a wave onto your web page or blog is similar to how you embed a YouTube video onto any web page: you copy and paste a bit of HTML and JavaScript from wave into your page. A bot called Madoqua can give you the code you need to embed on your site; read more about how to use Madoqua in Chapter 8, Wave Bots.

As of writing, only people logged into Wave can see waves embedded on other web sites. However, the Wave team has promised anonymous access to public, embedded waves, and when that happens, we'll be seeing many more waves outside of our inbox.

Now that you have a full sense of what's possible in Wave, the next chapter will show you how to use Wave's interface more efficiently.

References

  1. ↑ Google Wave Help: How do I link to another wave?, Google.com
  2. ↑ Google Wave Help: How do I attach files and/or images?, Google.com
  3. ↑ Google Wave Help: How do I share photos in Google Wave?, Google.com
  4. ↑ Google Wave Help: How does the spell checker work in Google Wave?, Google.com
  5. ↑ Google Wave, Twitter.com
  6. ↑ Google Wave Help: In what languages does the spell checker work?, Google.com


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