The nice thing about the gallery is that any extension submitted into the gallery is subjected to a review process that ensures quality and continuity within the Wave interface.

This means that some extensions are not included in the gallery. For example, we’ve talked about Rosy the translation bot and WavePlayer, but these extensions are not included in the gallery.

My complaint earlier on with extensions and gadgets was that there was a chaotic nature about them. One, to add these extensions, I was usually required to jump through a several step process in order to add them in a Wave. Or two, I would have add some random URL that I’d have to be able to remember and recall to the “Gadget URL” within a wave, or add the particular extension’s bot as a contact. And three, I had no idea how to determine the quality of a particular extension since I was relying on a third party website for information about the extension.

Five Criteria for Extension Developers

So the extension gallery is a step towards organizing these extensions and maintaing a reasonable level of quality and functionality. When it comes to designing an extension, there are five criteria developers must meet, which I will summarize, as described in the Google Wave API’s documentation.

1.) Make it Wave-y. Wave is a real-time, collaborative tool, so extensions should be created around this purpose. This means that extensions should encourage and receive participation from all individuals within a wave.

2.) Make it easy to use. Wave inevitably creates a unique learning curve because the technology is so different than what most users are used to. This is why extensions should be very easy to understand without the need for a lengthy set of instructions. An extension should be as intuitive to use as possible.

3.) Make it easy to install. Earlier I complained about how some extensions require you to enter in a gadget URL. Ideally, developers should be creating extensions that use an extension installer. An extension installer allows the user to install an extension which can then be accessed from the New Wave menu or from a wave’s toolbar. This eliminates the need to “Add a Gadget by URL.”

4.) Make it look good. This one might be pretty self-explanatory, but extensions should compliment the visual experience of Google Wave. An extension that looks like it belongs within the Wave interface makes the user experience a lot more comfortable and seamless.

5.) Make it useful or fun. Ultimately, extensions should help users collaborate more effectively and efficiently, or it should at least be fun to use (e.g. crossword puzzle, sudoku, etc.).

How to Submit Your Extension into the Gallery

If you have developed an extension and want to submit it into the gallery, you can submit it for consideration. It’s quite easy.

First, install the Submitty Extension.

After you’ve installed Submitty, select the “New Extension Submission” from the “New Wave” menu.

Lastly, fill out the information and instructions in the wave. Once, you’ve done this it’ll be able to be shared for review and consideration into the extension gallery.

Images used from: http://code.google.com/apis/wave/submitextension.html

What about a review system?

As the extension gallery grows, I could see the need for an extension review feature. When you get several different variants off of the Napkin extension, you’re going to want to know which drawing board is the best to use. A review system also allows developers to get feedback from those using their extensions. This would inevitably encourage developers to continue to make the best extensions in the gallery.

Overall, I’m excited to see the organization and quality control that the extension gallery brings. Hopefully this will continue to open the doors for well-developed extensions.

So far, what are your favorite extensions in the gallery?

Aunt Rosie translation bot

Because I already explained how to use Aunt Rosie in another post, I’ll be brief here. It seems like Aunt Rosie is one of the most popular translation bots used right now. Unlike some other translation bots, Aunt Rosie gives you the ability to translate in realtime. Your words are translated as you type them underneath your blip.

My own experience with using it has been fairly negative. One, it seems to slow down the wave even more so once the wave grows in size. Also, sometimes I’ve used Aunt Rosie and had my translation appear 30+ times below the blip. I don’t know if the creator of this app has fixed this problem or if it’s a problem on my end. I’m not sure what causes it. Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn’t.

“Translatey” Translation Bot

Translatey will translate your text from any language to the language you choose. You can add the Translatey bot to a wave by adding “translatey@appspot.com” as a participant to the wave. Once you do, a blip will appear with some instructions.

I responded to the blip with “/?” to get help. A list of language codes came up. You’ll see that each language is represented with a two character language code (e.g. Spanish = “es”).

I responded to this blip with “es” to designate that I want to translate into Spanish. This will translate any language I type in (English, German, French, etc.).

The cool thing about Translatey is that it automatically detects what language you are typing in. Another potential plus for some users is that later on you can change the language you want to translate into by just entering a new language code in a replying blip. For example, you could translate one blip into Dutch and then translate another blip into French.

One downside to some might be the fact that it doesn’t translate in realtime. In order for it to translate a blip, you must write the blip and then hit the hotkey “Shift + Enter” or hit the “Done” button. Then, a replying blip will translate the language.

“Multilingual” Translation Bot

The Multilingual translation bot works similarly to Translatey, but I found it has quite a few more options. You can add the Multilingual bot to a wave by adding “multilingual@appspot.com” as a participant to a wave. Once you do, a blip will appear with some not-so-helpful information.

If you reply to this blip by just typing in “/help” another blip will pop up with some helpful instructions.

You’ll notice with Multilingual you’ll have a lot more command options:

# Type /version to show the last version of Multilingual Bot

# Type /userlist to show registered user

# Type /lang_id /lang_id anywhere, your text will be translated to selected language, example: /en /de your text

# Type /notranslate anywhere, the bot will not translate your text

# Type lang_id to register your language, example for english: en

# Or just type your text, your language will be detected and translated to all registered language

Multilingual works a little bit differently. Rather than selecting a language to translate into, Multilingual automatically detects the language you are typing in and then will translate that into the registered language of each participant in the wave.

For example, if I register my language as English by typing in an empty blip “en,” the message of someone who types something in Spanish (or any other language) will be translated to me into English because that’s my registered language. If someone’s registered language was German, that message in Spanish would be translated to them in German.

This is an excellent feature that can be utilized multi-language waves. Hence the name: “Multilingual.”

Conclusion

Out of these three translation bots, I’ve had the best experience with Multilingual. I was a bit confused at first with the initial Multilingual blip that comes up, but simply typing in “/help” really, well, helps. I like the simplicity of it (e.g. not translating in realtime) and I also like the added options and commands that come with it. It’s also pretty nifty how it’ll automatically detect the language being typed and translate that to participants in the wave depending upon their registered language.

Have you tried these translation bots? Which one is your favorite to use?

Here’s how you can add it to a wave.

First, click the “Add Gadget by URL” button in the toolbar of the wave that you’d like to add the poll gadget to. When the prompt comes up, enter “http://wave.samuirai.de/poll20.xml” in the text box and click “Add.”

The poll gadget will load up in your wave.

In the main text box, you can type the question or reason for your poll. To add options simply click the “add options” link in the bottom left corner.

If you click the “settings” link, you have a few options for how you want your poll to function. If you select “hide the poll,” as a vote, you won’t be able to view the results of the poll until you vote. If you select “don’t allow correction,” once participants vote, they won’t be able to change their vote. If you select “share the poll,” all participants in the wave will be able to change the title of the poll, add options, and edit the poll’s settings. If you select “anonym,” participants won’t be able to see what others voted for. You can also change the number of votes each participant receives and the design of the poll.

Anytime you change these settings the poll is reset.

If you click the “diagrams” link at the bottom of the poll, you can see the results of the poll rendered into a pie chart.

Overall, the Poll Gadget 2.0 offers a lot of options to create a simple poll. It’s helpful that you can create the poll to be anonymous as well and that you are able to have some sort of feature to prohibit others from editing the poll. I have doubts that it would be reliable for gathering any type of scientific data, but it provides much more flexibility than the “Yes/No/Maybe” gadget.

While this might not necessarily allow you to create any artistic masterpieces, it is still a good way to share visual ideas if you happen to think that sort of way.

It’s really easy to add to your wave. Here’s how you can do it.

First, click on the “Add Gadget by URL” button in the toolbar of the wave you want to insert the Napkin gadget into.

Once the prompt comes up, enter in the URL “http://my-wave-gadgets.appspot.com/wave/NapkinGadget.xml” and then click “Add.” The Napkin gadget will load up into your wave.

You’ll notice in the upper-left corner of the gadget, you can change the color of your brush and the size of the brush. You can also undo any additions to the whiteboard or clear it if you’d like.

Overall, the gadget works well. It does exactly what you would expect. The obvious difficulty is that it’s pretty hard to draw with the mouse (at least for me). Depending on the type of work that you need the Napkin gadget for, I could see this working really well with a digital pen and tablet rather than trying to draw a picture with a regular computer mouse. As you can see, my picture above looks like a 1st grader drew it. Other than that, this is a great tool for bouncing quick drawings back and forth between people–or for playing some tic-tac-toe.

WavePlayer is a gadget that allows you to embed MP3 files in a wave. You’re embedded MP3 will appear in an embedded audio player like this:

Here’s how you can do it.

In the wave you’d like to embed a MP3 to, click the “Add Gadget by URL” button in the wave’s toolbar.

A prompt will come up asking you to type in a URL. You’ll need to type in the URL “http://www.waverz.com/waveplayer/http://www.yoururl.com/yourmp3file.mp3” and replace “http://www.yoururl.com/yourmp3file.mp3” with the full URL address of a remote MP3 file. This means the MP3 file you wish to embed must be hosted on a website. For example, with WavePlayer, you can’t embed a MP3 file that’s on your computer.

So you’re full URL will look like the following:

Then, just click “Add” and the WavePlayer gadget will be added to your wave.

Overall, it’s a cool gadget and works well, but eventually I would like to see a gadget that allows you to upload and embed any audio file right from your computer. This would be challenging though since the MP3 file would still need to be hosted somewhere. But it wouldn’t surprise me if we see something like this in the future.

This can be helpful if you want to share a website with participants in a wave without the extra step of having to click an external link outside of Wave. I also know some people will create a public wave around the topic of their website and then embed their website into the public wave as a form of sharing it with others.

In order to embed a web page into Google Wave, you’ll need to click the “Add Gadget by URL” button in the toolbar of the wave.

When a dialog comes up asking for the gadget URL, type in the URL of the iframe gadget: “http://wave-ide.appspot.com/iframe.xml“.

This will add the iframe gadget to your wave. Click the “Edit” link in the top left of the iframe gadget to change the web page that you want displayed within the iframe.

Simply change the iframe URL to the URL address of the web page that you want to be displayed in the iframe. You can also specify the height of the iframe.

When you click the “View” link, the specified URL will be shown in the iframe.

You can also embed PDFs if they are uploaded to a server (e.g. http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf). However, your browser does need to have the ability to render PDF files.

Because of this, in Google Chrome, I couldn’t get PDFs to successfully embed into the iframe, since Chrome does not have the ability to render PDFs (as far as I know). Rather than embedding the PDF, it automatically downloaded in my browser.

Video

Transcript

Hi, my name is Ian and I’m a blogger at gwtips.com. Here, we’ll take a look at the Maps gadget in Google Wave and how to use it. We’ll also take a look at some of the more practical uses for Maps in Wave too.

First, create a new wave. To add the Maps gadget, click the “More Actions” icon, then select the Maps icon, which looks like a map marker. The Maps gadget has now been added to the wave.

We can interact with the gadget now. The first major tool in the Maps gadget is, obviously, the “Hand” tool. Use this to move around in Maps. I’m in Hilliard right now, but let’s go over to Downtown Columbus.

The second tool that we’ll look at is the “Line” tool. You can draw a line anywhere in Google Maps. So, let’s say you wanted to let your friends know about your favorite walk route through Downtown Columbus. Use the Line tool and draw!

Third, you can use the “Marker” tool to highlight points of interest to your friends. On the walk that I have mapped out, I go past the Columbus College for Arts and Design. Let’s put a marker on right now. In the second field, I can even add some comments here.

The “Polygon” tool is useful too. It allows anybody to highlight anything on the map. Again, just click and drag.

The last tool we’ll take a look at is Maps’ search feature. You can look up any location and easily place a marker on the map for the entire wave to see.

And that’s it! Happy mapping!

One of these tools is “Aunt Rosie” the translation robot. Aunt Rosie gives you the ability to communicate with someone who might even speak a different language than you. Whatever you type is translated into the language of your choice. Here’s how you can do it.

First, you’ll need to add “aunt-rosie@appspot.com” to your contacts list.

Then, you’ll need to create a new wave and add “aunt-rosie@appspot.com” to the wave.

Once you start typing something, Rosy will load and you’ll get a drop down box to select the language you would like to translate into. You’ll notice there is quite a selection of languages available. As you’ll see in the picture below, I selected Spanish.

If you choose to reply with a new blip within the wave, unfortunately, you will have to reselect the language you’d like to translate into. However, one of the advantages of Aunt Rosie over other translation bots (e.g. Translabot) is that Aunt Rosie translates what you type in real-time. This eliminates the need to press a “translate” button when you are finished typing.

For the most part, I’ve found Aunt Rosie to work pretty well. I have noticed for some languages that not all my words will translate, but this is expected from any translator from what I’ve experienced.

What do you think of Aunt Rosie?

First, you’ll need to add tweety-wave@appspot.com to your contacts.

Secondly, you’ll need to create a new wave and add Tweety to the wave. When you do this, you’ll want to make sure that your pop-up blocker is turned off because the Tweety extension will be added to the wave and a window will pop-up asking you for your Twitter login details.

Enter your Twitter login details when the window pops up.

Once you have logged in Tweety the Twitbot will display all your friend’s Twitter updates and allow you to update your Twitter status.

There are a couple things worth mentioning. One, the usernames of the Twitter users that you are following show up as “username@tweety-wave.appspot.com.” Because of this, you can’t click on these usernames and view their Twitter page. Hopefully, this would be changed in the future.

Secondly, any participant of the wave with Tweety can tweet on behalf of the authenticated Twitter user. So that means, if I am logged in with Tweety, and I add Tim to the Wave, Tim could tweet from my account, since I am logged in under that wave.

Overall, I don’t see the Tweety extension having the same power as say an application like TweetDeck or logging into your Twitter account from the web, but it is beneficial to be able to centralize Twitter right into your Google Wave account.