So after a tormenting 24 hours without a wave account I finally got my invite last evening (Thanks @blamborn and Mat). So I figured I’d chronicle my first day’s adventures and add to the wave conversation on the intertubes, especially since just the day before I had blogged about what I thought Wave was about. I have a few friends on Wave already so it wasnt a complete case of the empty room syndrome, but my impressions might change once my contact list there reaches any critical mass.

First off: the interface. Quite a few people have talked about Wave looks pretty, (it even has drop shadows and rounded corners), but quite frankly, they are a waste of space here and actually hurt the UI. The gap between the modules is way too much (separator bars should be much thinner), and rounded corners dont really allow modules to butt up against each other too close. I have no idea whats going on with the smart scrollbar on the right hand side of the message window and why it only scroll to a fraction of the size of the main document. Besides that is okay, definitely not as minimalistic as Google has a reputation for.

My first couple of Waves were to myself, I added a couple of robots from the Robots gallery, but most of them didnt work for me. The idea of such extensions is interesting though this is pretty much the same as Yahoo Mail Apps or Zimbra mail or Yahoo Messenger plugins. Not really a new idea or that revolutionary.

I started a wave with Mat and another friend Nick and started working on a cheatsheet for Freemarker, a templating language for Java that we use at Comcast Interactive Media. Here it got kinda interesting, but the formatting options were a far cry from google docs (but thats okay considering the early beta stage here). What was really crazy was that people were adding to the content by “replying” to the original message. What I really thought we should have been doing was adding to the main document which is editable at any time. What this made me realize that there is indeed a difference between a conversation around a document and the document itself. Wave blurs the difference which makes you think a lot more on what should go where.

Nick later discovered the with:public search on wave that just showed all public waves, some with a lot of live editing going on. Cool! … or wait, isnt this what Yahoo chat was (I used to be a fair addict to Y!Chat in my teens). Heck, even the waves sounded like chat rooms: “Utah Wave Users”, “JQuery Users Wave”, etc.So I tried going into a couple of *rooms* and they were pretty chaotic. A few of the wave starters were trying to maintain some order in there (”please dont append to this part”, “please start new waves for smaller topics”, etc). Yeah I left pretty quick.

So here are my thoughts:

• The idea of a blended medium is interesting but communication is indeed of differnt types: conversations, collaboration on a document, announcements do need different visual cues even if not different applications. For example, could a wave be *marked* as a conversation (chat or email) and then it could force a temporally sorted exchange or marking it as a document could force all conversations/comments on a sidebar.
• The idea of robots appending content to a messages is powerful. I can imagine quite a few uses for it (you know, like bots do on IRC)
• Gadgets on Google Wave could be awesome
• Google Wave will definitely have an app store in the near future
• Wave definitely needs an SMTP gateway asap that translates email to a “dumb-wave” or a conversation wave as I mentioned in the first point here.
• I think a good use case for it is for a personal notebook. I use Evernote right now to jot down thoughts etc, but Wave could be a pretty awesome note taker that I could occasionally share a note from

So what do you think. Do you like it? Think it’ll be the future of email? (my opinion, not the current version but something it morphs to)

Off late I have become pretty involved in a local (Philadelphia) user group called RefreshPhilly. The group meets the first Monday of every month and hosts a couple of talks by some local new-media professionals, designers or developers. The event is hosted at the new Comcast building where I work.
However like a lot of big corporate buildings, the Comcast building only allows registered guests into the building. This meant that all attendees had to be registered with building security to allow them to enter. Since our attendee list often reaches 100 odd people, I needed to get the names to security in chunks, so that I didnt have to get all of them at the last second. Unfortunately the Facebook events page only shows the total number of people who have confirmed their attendence. What I really needed was “How many new people have confirmed since the last time I looked”. So I whipped this little app that uses the Facebook API to take snapshots of the attendee lists from any Facebook event (using a valid event id) at any time and show the number of new people who have confirmed attending or maybe attending status by comparing the snapshot to the previous snapshot saved on a local file.

I am almost sure this app will only ever have one user (me) but hey, if you ever need it, you can download it from here. Feel free to comment if you would like to see any additional functionality here, or if you have an idea for this being a more practical app

I am excited to finally announce the alpha release of EspressoReader. EspressoReader, in its current incarnation, is a desktop app for Google Reader. However the goal is to create an application for managing all the information streams you read on a daily basis, and providing user interfaces that help sifting through all of that. For example, this release includes a PhotoView that lays out all the images in different feeds one below the other, which works out really well if you are subscribed to image heavy feeds like web comics.

You can download the application from here.
Update: I am removing the link to the installer as more and more people keep having a broken experience with version 1. Please get on the alpha list for version 2 at EspressoReader.com. The new system should be a lot more stable since it uses a different authentication system that seems to be working much better.

Features:
Multiple view support like Text, Images and Browser (more coming soon)
FullScreen support
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Related entries from your other subscriptions

Features coming soon (almost done but couldn’t finish for this release):
Offline support / Prefetch support (allowing you to load all subscriptions for a category when reading an entry for more useful Related Feeds functionality)
Improved Related Feeds Algorithm

Other list of proposed features can be found here. Feel free to add to that list.

Also the application is completely charityware. Please consider donating to Unicef if you find this application useful.

EspressoReader was built completely with OpenPyro.

[Update: Fixed mime-type issues that were causing .air apps to download as .zip files and then extracted]