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Google Wave Reviewed
Michael_Curator writes "Developers are finally getting their hands on the developer preview of Google's Wave, which means we can finally get some first-hand accounts of what it's really like to use, unfiltered by Google's own programmers. Ben Rometsch, a developer with U.K. Web development firm Solid State, blogged that, it's 'probably the most advanced application in a browser that I've seen.' Wave is like giant Web page onto which users can drag and drop any kind of object, including instant messaging and IRC [Internet Relay Client] clients, e-mail, and wikis, as well as gadgets like maps and video. All conversations, work product and applications are stored on remote servers — presumably forever. 'It's like real time email. On crack,' he wrote. And unlike the typically minimalist Google UI, 'It feels a lot more like a desktop application that just so happens to live in your browser.'" User molex333 has already written a Slashdot app and shares his initial reactions here.
Does the expression "on crack" mean, "better"? And if so, why?
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They've said they're going to open-source the server so others can host their own waves. Until then, since I'd want to use this for collaborative development, and possibly for hosting my own sites, I'd rather not they own my content.
Google is probably one of the most if not the most innovative companies in the world, I wouldn't be surprised if they have just created the next generation of communication!
Are you kidding? Again, Google has cobbled together existing technology and instead of learning the lesson that SMTP taught US 25 years ago Google is content to have something else that will live in beta for years. Why create new technology when you can duct tape existing things together?
While I'm teetering on the brink of ranting, so Google is releasing an OS, while they continue to overload the web browser with javascript and flash in an effort to turn it into an operating system. Again, we've already done this. We have these tools already. It's called a Native Application. Write some C for christ sake, or hell, even a Java SE app. Maybe some QT/OpenGL? Writing all these applications for the browser is putting a square peg in a round hole.
I want my flying cars. I was promised flying cars......
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> Write some C for christ sake, or hell, even a Java SE app.
How is that going to get them more eyeballs to sell to their advertisers?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
No. Sharepoint is a marketing term covering a disparate range of collaborative applications from Microsoft. Similar to how the .NET label was a marketing label for a bunch of disparate technologies.
Google Wave is a single innovative new technology on which many collaborative tools are and may be built.
Do you work for google PR? Sharepoint is a portal server and a webapp framework. Disparate huh?
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Google has cobbled together existing technology
This is the mother of all 'get off my lawn' arguments. Using existing technology is what brings us most innovations. In fact, using existing technology is what every programmer does.
... and instead of learning the lesson that SMTP taught US 25 years ago Google is content to have something else that will live in beta for years.
SMTP is in beta?
I've only seen the demovideo and done a bit of reading. The ideas behind wave are innovative, ambitious and pretty well thought through. If wave becomes a success, it will take years before it's massively deployed. It might also take years to fail spectacularly, either through bad development decisions, or just through failing to come up with the killer-app.
But to bash it now is stupid. Google is doing this the right way. They're following a vision that might be wrong, or might not be what you're looking for. But it will be open-sourced, so you can create your own wave services. And it doesn't have to be inside a browser, as far as I understand it.
Error 001
Security Scan and Virus Detection do not work with your operating system.
But between this and Google OS and everything else, google is getting dangerously capable of mass information collection for nefarious purposes (read: more than is currently possible). Ive been willing enough to forgive the search engine because of its usefulness, but I see Google as the biggest potential data mining operation in the world. Have an OS, web search, email, chat, and voice all have the central management of one company who for all we know could have been served on of those secret orders they cant even talk about that all data mussed be passed on to some crazy orwellian agency. Not saying its true, but it makes you wonder...now I'm off to finish building my patented alaskan off-the-grid living structure called an igloo.
"It's ok, I'm completely secure as long as my iron is off"
Most likely, this is an attempt at a linguistic intensification of the idiom "on steroids." There was a time when steroid use was more of a taboo and to reference it in casual conversation was marginally titillating, but perhaps "on crack" comes closer to attaining that mischievousness today.
Even though it doesn't really make sense (steroids increase muscle mass, but crack doesn't really increase anything except an extreme imbalance of neurotransmitters) it fits with our general cultural pattern of intensifying language. "Going ape," for instance, was an appropriate term for wild human behavior as apes tend to be associated with wild movements, but "going apeshit," while sounding more intense, doesn't make any semantic sense in that an ape's feces don't exactly move much at all.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
It's an open protocol, you can make whatever GUI you want. In the video they were using a terminal client.
"instead of learning the lesson that SMTP taught US 25 years ago " which lesson in particular are they ignoring?
As for the thick app argument, why do you care? Seriously, if the solution works it works. The toggle switch guys scoffed at the punch card guys, the punch card guys scoffed at the interactive asm editor guys, the asm guys scoffed at the C guys, the C guys scoffed at the Java guys, the Java guys scoff at the Ruby/Python/PHP/JS guys.
You don't see the trend?
This isn't a coke vs. pepsi thing. I can run MS excel with 20 megs of ram. Google spreedsheet in firefox takes over 100 megs of ram. An ftp socket and script to upload my excel file somewhere for sharing doesn't account for 80 megs worth of space complexity: 400% more resources than the thick client app! Once more, someone could have a macro in excel that does the uploading with one-click, so grandma can do it, and maybe you'll see 21 megs of ram used. I just don't understand why we aren't see new and DIFFERNT types of software instead of office applications, photo editors, audio editors, 3d games, and anything else you've used before appear on the web, but with Social 3.0!
I'm all about the right tool for the right job: I don't care who makes it as long as it works well, is reliable and efficient. Google does a lot of things, none particularly well, sans advertising; Wolfram even has better search then they do and I really to hate to say this, but Bing has decent results. (i still default to google search though)
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I see your problem, you're using Firefox. That's what's eating your RAM, sir. Google spreadsheet in Chrome: 33MB.
Running apps from your desktop adds another layer in your file storage. If you leave your desk, you have to bring your files with you to use them.
It's a trade-off. Desktop apps have their purpose, web apps do as well. Find what suits YOUR needs and use the best choice. No one is forcing you to go one way or another, you are free to keep Excel, Word, etc. Calm down. Breathe.
There. All is better.
A web browser should never, and I mean NEVER, need half a gig of memory
A word processing app should never come on more than one floppy disk.
Games should not be in 3D.
Computers do not need sound cards goshdarnit!
Gah... change!
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
"My underlying point is that Moore's law won't help this because Moore's law assumes we're moving in a single direction: forward."
Which is obviously not true, hence Intel's new ads: "Twice as slow as our last processor!"
Look, it's always been that way: Hardware got faster, software got slower. It'll always be that way. It has to be that way, without adding abstractions we couldn't build today's complex software as easily.
Even when we have short-term changes in that (netbooks made processors slower), it's only temporary. My 300$ netbook isn't fast, but it's still faster than my notebook from two generations ago.