anticipating Google Wave

Wave: First Paddlings November 23, 2009

I got my invite a week or two back, and in between other things, have been dabbling in Google Wave as it is at the moment.

I haven’t got many contacts yet, so the interactive side of things is a little thin. But for now, that’s fine, as I try to figure out ways to use this new platform.

If I had a wide screen, I think I would be enjoying the experience a little more – with the three columns of the standard layout, there isn’t really room on my laptop screen to have really good view of both the preview/search column and the wave content column.

Adding gadgets beyond the few ‘recommended’ gadgets takes a bit of looking around for via search. I’m still not sure yet whether each participant in a wave needs to activate all the gadgets in a wave.

Speed wasn’t as bad as I had imagined, but still quite jerky once there’s more than one working on simultaneous editing. Editing a wave just by myself was a bit smoother, but the delay was enough to sometimes confuse things, particularly with typos and backspacing.

As a text editor, it has a good range of functions – everything I need for the sort of typing I do, except for tables. Maybe tables will come as a gadget rather than a text editor function?

So the jury remains out as to whether it will fit my needs as it stands.