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

Quick Inbox Preview

The Google Wave interface usually needs some time to get loaded. ‘Quick Inbox’ gives you a quick overview of waves in your inbox and marks those which contain changes. This preview loads within seconds even on slow network connections like EDGE or 3G.

Push Notifications

Waveboard is the first iPhone app that offers build in Push Notifications for Google Wave. To get notified about changes add the wave robot xwaveboard@appspot.com to the wave you like to get notifications from. Visit our Waveboard Push Information page for detailed informations.

This new release describes the way that Waveboard likes to go in iPhone Development i.e. to let Google Wave become a more integrated service on this device. It is also planned that the Mac and the iPhone applications will get closer to each other and become a strong team for working with Waves.

Push Notification

The Push Notification feature I will introduce in Waveboard 2.0 is based on the Google Robot technology. You add a robot to a wave and it will send you notifications if the wave contents change. See these videos for more informations.

The last weeks the Google Wave Robots were not usable because there was a bug on Googles side that kept me from finishing my work on the robot. Also the rejection last week because of private API use in relation to the included Three20 software stopped my work here.

This all lead to the introduction of a bug that made Push Notification unusable in the version I submitted to Apple and therefore I replaced it with a fixed version today. But please notice my considerations too:

Obstruction through AppStore Review Process

As you might already have noted I’m not a friend of the AppStore review process. In my opinion this is a totally useless process that is more a censorship than anything else. Technically there is no need for such a process since apps are running in closed sandboxes anyway and free access to private data like address book should better be controlled by the operations system (why don’t they do that?) than by the review team. Often they just kick off apps because of their contents e.g. the threw out the very popular german  Stern Magazine App because of nudity (in Europe nudity is something considered natural…) but they let in Adolf Hitlers “Mein Kampf” (of which publication and use of nazi symbols is punished by jail up to 3 years in Germany; the app has been removed after some days at least).

Make the Choice

But that’s not the point in this case. I had to decide to loose another week in the AppReview process (it usually takes from 2 weeks minimum up to many months and is total in-transparent) or to have a non working app in the AppStore. Usually as a free developer without limitations, e.g. if developing for MacOS, I just create the update, put it on my web server and after two days all copies are updated by automatic update. But you cannot with the AppStore. I know a lot of stories where developers already have send a bugfix release to Apple but in the meanwhile they get bad press and bad votes because of the bugs. But it is not in their hands! And therefore I decided to replace the app in review, even if it then took more than a month since I already finished the new updates.

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.

In addition to the normal appearance of Google Wave in Mobile Safari you will get an integrated browser for external links in Waves. With shaking the iPhone you activate a menu that lets you perform other actions.

This video shows the basic functionality in an early version of Waveboard:

Currently we are working on a better push notification service for Google Wave. You’ll get the latest news on that in this blog or even faster by Follow us on Twitter.