When Safari 5 was published by Apple most Waveboard users experienced an error message on the Google Wave page. It turned out that the cause was that Safari 5 when run in 32 bit mode was not compatible with Google Wave. Even Apple was surprised when I discussed the issue with them on the WWDC in San Francisco last week.

Waveboard has been using this 32 bit mode to support the Google Gears plugin which needed this mode. To fix the problem I needed to update to 64 bit mode, but also drop the Google Gears support. Anyways the Gears plugin was is not supported by Google any more since HTML 5 features making their way into most browsers now.

On the Google IO conference a lot of new features have been added to Wave. I am planning to add support for those features like custom domains for business and advanced notifications in a next major release. If you are interested in the latest releases you might want to turn on ‘ Include beta releases’ in your Waveboard prefs.

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The Quick Inbox preview now shows much more details of the waves in the inbox, similar to the one provided by wave itself. Of course it still load very fast so you’ll get an impression of changes within seconds.

This release also fixes a small bug regarding the registration of the device for push notification, this sometimes didn’t work with the first try.

The next release will have improvements in how to handle push notifications and of course will be tablet compatible

Features

These are the main new features:

• Waveboard can now receive push notifications from the Waveboard robot at xwaveboard.appspot.com.
• Quick Inbox shows a read only list of most recent waves directly after applications launch. Optionally the web view can be loaded in the background.
• Google Account credentials dialog that remembers your log in informations. You can choose to be asked for the password each time the app starts.
• Removed the shake feature, because it is not needed any more.

Demo

Quick Inbox

Many users were not happy with the slow loading of Google Wave on the iPhone. Though this is not in the hands of Waveboard to speed this up, the new release will come up with an alternative called ‘Quick Inbox’ This gives you a fast overview which Waves have changed. Here is a demo that shows how fast the loading is on Edge:

Push Notifications

Another feature that has been added it Push Notification without the use of third party tools. It is realized through intelligent Wave Robots. I will explain this technology later on this blog. Here is a little demo showing that it is quite quick and informative:

Push Notification

The people of Prowl have been so friendly to add support for Waveboard to their app. It is available right now. Just update the “Launchable List” in the Settings section “Redirections”. Now you can add a redirection to the iPhone Waveboard App. To get push notifications set up Waveboard for Mac to send the Growl notifications to Prowl. Sounds complicated? It isn’t This one and a little minute video explains it all:

Future

This is an interim Push Notification solution. We hope to get better direct support of notifications into the next release of Waveboard for iPhone. But the AppStore review process is slow, therefore in the meantime the Prowl trick should work quite good for most cases. We will keep you updated on all changes on this blog and on Twitter @holtwick.