From The Complete Guide to Google Wave: How to Use Google Wave
Has creado waves y participado en ellas, has llenado tu lista de contactos, y guardado búsquedas reutilizables en otras waves. Es tiempo de escarbar en las características avanzadas de Wave.
Google Wave es fundamentalmente un sistema centrado en el documento, por lo que querrás hacer waves elegantes, con colores, tipografía, encabezamientos y otros estilos propios de los procesadores de texto. Puedes adjuntar archivos y crear presentaciones de fotografías en tus waves, y agregar objetos interactivos como mapas, encuestas Sí/No/Puede ser, y videos YouTube. Aprende cómo copiar waves y reproducir las revisiones a lo largo del tiempo. Al terminar este capítulo, habrás pasado de ser un principiante a graduarte como un usuario competente de Wave.
Formatea tus Waves
Wave ofrece capacidades básicas de formato, tipo procesador de texto, incluyendo tipografía, colores, encabezamientos y viñetas para hacer sus waves más legibles y profesionales. Cuando compones o editas un wave, selecciona el texto que deseas formatear y usa los botones de la barra de herramientas de edición que se muestran en la Figura 5-1. Ten en mente que los botones pueden no aparecer si tu wave está en una ventana muy estrecha. Si así ocurre, cliquea el botón ... (ptos. suspensivos) para expandir el resto en un menú de cascada.
La Figura 5-1 muestra una barra de herramientas de edición de wave, y ejemplos de las capacidades de edición de Wave. De izquierda a derecha, una barra de herramientas de edición de wave te permite:
- Poner el texto en negrita, itálica, subrayarlo o tacharlo
- Seleccionar una de 14 familias de tipografía (de Arial a Verdana)
- Asignar un color al texto o destacar el fondo con otro color
- Escoger uno de cuatro niveles de encabezamiento (de varios tamaños) o el tamaño de texto por defecto.
- Crear una lista con viñetas
- Indentar or "outdentar" párrafos, y alinear el texto a la izquierda, a la derecha o al centro.
El resto de los botones de la barra de herramientas de edición, a partir del botón de vínculos, inserta varios tipos de contenido interactivo en tu wave.
Insertar enlaces en Waves
No sólo puede enlazarse a sitios web externos en un wave, también se puede enlazar a otros waves, en estilo wiki. Aunque técnicamente puedes introducir un ID de wave en la URL o al campo ID_de_wave que se muestran en la Figura 5-2, extraer un ID de wave no es un proceso intuitivo. Hay una forma mucho más simple: primero, mientras editas tu wave, busca en el panel de búsquedas el wave que quieres enlazar. Luego, arrástralo y déjalo sobre el wave que estás editando para crear el vínculo. [1] Recuerda que los participantes en tu wave podrán abrir el wave enlazado sólo si ellos también participan en el. Cuando otros hacen clic el enlace al wave, este se abre en el panel del wave actual.
Añadir enlaces, imágenes y clips de Youtube directamente desde los resultados de Búsqueda de Google
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 choose Embed video from the drop-down 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 Google Wave gadget: an interactive bit of web content in-wave.
Remove an embedded video player from your wave the way you do any gadget: hover over it, and then from the drop-down menu that appears on the upper right corner, choose Delete.
Adjunta archivos a tus Waves
Like email, you can attach files to your waves, including images. There are two ways to add a file or image into 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.)
- Click the paper clip icon on your wave's toolbar, and then choose the file you want to upload from the open dialog.
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.
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 Google 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]
Comparte fotos en Wave
One of the biggest advantages of sharing photos with others in Wave is the ability to collaborate on photo captions. For example, after a wedding, if both sides of the family add all their photos to a shared wave, they can add the names of who appeared in each photo to the captions, depending on who knows who. Like edits to regular wave text, caption updates happen real-time, and you can watch wave participants change them live.
caption:"your search terms" search operator.
Once photo captions are set, you can view a set of photos in-wave in a slide show.
Play a Photo Slide Show in Wave
When you add a photos to a wave, their thumbnails appears 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 on the bottom of that wave. Click the Images button and choose View as slide show to easily flip through the photos at their full sizes, as shown in Figure 5-5.
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 its 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 that come in Wave: the Map gadget and the Yes/No/Maybe gadget.
The Map 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 collaborators 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 on the bottom of the map gadget. Click a result, then add that pinpoint to your map by clicking the Create copy on map button, as shown in Figure 5-6.
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.
You can also add lines and filled polygons to your map. Click the Line and Polygon buttons to the right of the search box on the bottom of the map 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 choose Map, Satellite, or Hybrid mode. Then click the Done button (or press Shift+Enter) to save your changes. This is the state that your collaborators 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 your collaborators snap back to the saved, shared state of the map.) If a collaborator switches into wave edit mode and changes the state of the map, draws on it, or adds markers, the rest of the collaborators can see that activity real-time.
To delete a map from a wave, click the drop-down in the map's upper right corner, and select Delete.
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 Map 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 collaborators to it.
To respond to the question, you and your collaborators 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 5-7. 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 just clicking a different answer.
To delete the Yes/No/Maybe gadget, in edit mode, hover over it. From the drop-down in the upper right corner, choose Delete.
Spell Check Your Waves
Google 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 5-8. [4]
If the word is spelled just how you intended, you can ignore the red underline. Alternately, select your spelling from the bottom of the correction suggestion drop-down.
Wave's interface is available in U.S. English only. However, the spell checker understands and offers correction suggestions in more languages[5] 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—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. 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.
To copy a wave, click the drop-down menu on any blip's upper right corner, and choose 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.
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 at that point in time. 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 a rewind, back, forward, and fast-forward button 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 5-9.
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 make better sense of the conversation.
Playback Use Case: Restore a Past Revision
An alternate use of playback is to restore a past version of a wave. While Wave doesn't let you roll back a wave to a previous state (yet), you can resurrect an old version of a wave by copying a past revision to a new wave. In playback mode, on any revision, you can select Copy to new wave to create a whole new wave populated with that revision's contents, as shown in Figure 5-9.
Make a Wave Public
Instead of adding participants to your wave one by one, you can make a wave accessible to everyone on the Wave server by making it public. To make a wave public, there's no one-click button; there's a trick. Add the public@a.gwave.com Wave ID to your Contacts list the way you would any other contact: click the + (plus) button on the bottom right of your Contacts panel, and enter public@a.gwave.com in the address field.
Even though Wave says "User does not have a Google Wave account" and the Submit button is disabled as shown in Figure 5-10, press Enter anyway. The public contact (which represents a user group of everyone on the server) appears in your Contacts list.
public@a.gwave.com to your Contacts list. Press Enter anyway to add it to your list.
public@a.gwave.com to your Contacts list using the + (plus) button on the bottom of the Contacts panel, not by entering the ID into the search panel.
Once public@a.gwave.com is in your Contacts list, to make any wave public, add it as a participant. Now your wave appears in search results for with:public.
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.
public@a.gwave.com contact may not stay in your Contacts panel the way other contacts do. If you use Wave at another computer or from another browser, you may have to add public@a.gwave.com to your Contacts list again by hand.
Since dealing with the evasive public@a.gwave.com contact has so many pitfalls, someone developed a Wave bot to make things easier. Add easypublic@appspot.com to your Contacts list, and it will stick. Then, add the Easy Public bot to any wave to make it public. Here's more on how the Easy Public bot works.
Envía una Respuesta que sólo Algunos pueden Ver
Un grupo de amigos planea ir a ver una película que no te interesa, y tú deseas preguntar a una de tus amigas si desearía ir contigo a ver algo distinto, aparte del grupo—sin que el resto se entere. En Wave, dentro de una wave grande puedes enviar una respuesta que sólo algunos pueden ver.
Para enviar una respuesta privada, del menú de cascada de arriba a la derecha de un wave, escoge Private reply. Aparece un nuevo blip indentado con un encabezamiento azul adicional para definir participantes. Escribe tu mensaje privado, y luego simplemente agrega los destinatarios que desees de la forma usual. Si alguien es participante de la wave madre pero no de la respuesta privada, no verá este último mensaje.
Ahora que ya tienes un sentido completo de lo que es posible en Wave, es hora de hacerse más eficiente en el uso de su interfaz, en el Capítulo 6, Domina la Interfaz de Wave.
References
- ↑ Google Wave Help: How do I link to another wave?, Google.com
- ↑ Google Wave Help: How do I attach files and/or images?, Google.com
- ↑ Google Wave Help: How do I share photos in Google Wave?, Google.com
- ↑ Google Wave Help: How does the spell checker work in Google Wave?, Google.com
- ↑ Google Wave Help: In what languages does the spell checker work?, Google.com
