Google Wave Tips

Google Wave has a basic “Yes/No/Maybe” gadget but this can be a bit limiting when you have a question for participants in a wave that goes beyond a yes, no, or maybe answer. Poll Gadget 2.0 allows you to create a custom poll with custom options and settings. It’s one of the best customizable poll gadgets that I’ve used so far.

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.

The Napkin gadget allows you to insert a “whiteboard” right into Google Wave so you can collaborate with live, handwritten drawings. You can customize brush color and size, and you have options to undo or clear your drawing.

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.

Google Wave is meant to be a platform that allows collaboration on a variety of different levels. When you wave, you’re not just limited to an exchange of text like traditional instant messaging, but you can even include elements like video and audio.

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.

Google Wave gadgets add increased functionality to Wave. The “<iframe>” gadget allows you to embed a web page into Google Wave.

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.