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.

Thanks for your support.

The following features – some of them are unique to Waveboard – make it such a useful app:

• Notifications in various ways: status bar icon, Growl notifications, dock badge icon, push notification for the iPhone tool
• Seamless integration of Google Gears with built in plugin enables e.g drag and drop support for file uploads
• Printing and saving single waves
• Mac like keyboard shortcuts
• More features in the built in Safari based browser

Thanks to all customers for supporting Waveboard in the development phase!

Download Waveboard Mac 0.12

But let’s see the changes in detail:

Trial mode

Waveboard is also available as PRO edition with extended functionalities like printing and saving waves and extended notification services. Now you can test these features for 14 days in the trial period. Learn more about the PRO features in this overview.

Google Gears

Google officially announced to discontinue Gears support in favor of HTML5 technologies. In the meantime Gears is the only way to get drag and drop support on the Mac. Waveboard has a unique built in support for Gears on Snow Leopard. But now you can also decide to explicitly turn Gears off if you prefer the basic way of waving.

PressKit

You may now find some useful images, icons and screen shots in the press kits for Mac and iPhone.

Future

A new major release is in the works and will add support for multiple Google Wave accounts. A new browser component will add exiting new features and offer independency of cookie sharing with Safari. The overall memory usage will also be optimized. Stay tuned at get the latest news on Twitter and Facebook.

Google Gears

Waveboard is on its way to more stability to become the #1 tool for working with Google Wave. Although the app is quite robust some people experienced troubles while starting the app. If you are one of them please update to this version and make sure to remove previous Google Gears installations. Here is a step by step guide explaining how this can be done: http://www.getwaveboard.com/gears/

New Features

• Dockless Mode (see also Waveboard PRO)
  You can decide if you want the dock icon to appear or note. Please note that the main window will not have the usual menu. You have to access menu entries trough the status menu.
• Save Wave Content as Webarchive (see also Waveboard PRO)
  The contents of the current wave are saved in Webarchive format without the surrounding element and without Javascript. This can be useful e.g. for reference versioning or sending contents to non Wave participants.
• Link Status Informations on Mouse Over

Fixes

• Removed a bug in crash reporter.
• Disabled loading of not correct installed Google Gears. Gears will automatically be disabled on errors.
• When hidden the web plugins did float the console log, therefore plugins are disabled when the app is hidden. On unhide the content of the window is refreshed to get the plugins to work again.
• Fixed small memory leaks.

Testing

If you want to be on the cutting edge you are welcome to join the beta testing community. In very short release cycles we are testing and discussing new features. See how to here:

http://www.getwaveboard.com/beta/

Google Gears Integration

It integrates Google Gears because under Snow Leopard the installation is not very trivial but in the same moment some key functionalities of Google Wave do not work without it. After some days of Beta testing, with very passionate Beta testers whom I would like to thank, it should finally work quite well.

Notification

Another focus has been on the notification features. New Waves are now also listed in the status menu for direct access. On mouse over the tooltip show the latest changes so you can quickly decide if looking at it does make sense or not. A lot of other minor changes have been added.

Commercial PRO Features

A lot of time for development and research has been put into Waveboard to make it an easy springboard for the early Google Wave audience. If you like the product and would like to support the work you might like to buy a PRO Edition for 9 EUR. This will enable the following features:

• Printing single Waves (this is still not possible with regular browsers)
• Open unread Inbox Waves directly from the status menu
• Change the appearance of the status menu icon
• Automatically reset notification status on window activation
• More features will come in the next releases

Thank you all very much for the positive feedback and your support!

Inbox Notifications

Waveboard takes its update notifications from an information that is available from the Google Waves title informations. These counting is sometimes confusing and not very informative. Therefore the new “Inbox Notification” periodically reads the changes from the Inbox folder of Google Wave. In Growl it then displays the name of the wave, the count of unread changes and the last changed blip and it’s author. This way you don’t need to open Waveboard to see what the changes are about. It is also very useful if you want to use it together with the iPhone Push Notification.

To use this feature go to the preferences and choose “Account”. Enter your Google Account credentials (not your Wave address) and check if these informations are valid. Then select an interval from the drop down below. If you use this way of notification, the old notification method will be turned off.

Global Hotkey

In the preferences you can define a keyboard shortcut that for global access. Even if Waveboard is not the frontmost and active application you can use this shortcut to bring the Waveboard window to front. If you press the shortcut again or while the window is visible, the window will be hidden.

Location

With “Open Location” or by pressing CMD+L a dialog for location change appears. It can handle URLs and Wave IDs. If the pasteboard contains useful informations they will be filled into the textfield.

Other Changes

These are some more changes:

• Status menu icon appearance can be changed
• Find in text dialog has been added
• Toolbar has been added for navigation and loading indication
• More Mac like keyboard shortcuts have been added
• User Agent Information can be changed to imitate “Safari” to avoid troubles with some Plugins and services
• Option to hide the window on application launch

¹ Fluid is a tool to create Site Specific Browsers (SSB). You can add user scripts to add notifications and change settings to get other features like remembering the last opened page.

² An extension for Firefox is available to add integrated wave notifications.

Another nice feature is the support of Mac Keyboard Shortcuts. You can already use the shortcuts defined by Google , but we Mac users like to use CMD+Something key combinations and Waveboard addresses this need.

Since this is a software in development a feedback functionality is crucial. Therefore I integrated a very simple dialog in the Help menu that should help us to build a better product.

Enjoy the new version and this is the full change log:

• New: Printing of single Waves without clutters
• New: Remember last URL option. Use this if you want to return to the last view on next Waveboard launch
• New: Map Google Wave keyboard shortcuts to more Mac like shortcuts. Defined in new menu ‘Edit/Wave’
• New: Welcome message on application launch New: Send feedback function in ‘Help’ menu
• New: Link to FAQ page in ‘Help’ menu
• New: Open home URL to start initial URL again in ‘View’
• Update: Warning dialog for if user wants to print a non maximized Wave
• Update: Software updates are sheduled after each 4 hours
• Update: Software updates can now optionally send system profiles to help development and improvement of Waveboard
• Fix: Growl does only notify if more than zero
• Fix: Reload button looses CMD+R shortcut
• Fix: Find by selection looses CMD+E shortcut
• Fix: Copy Wave ID disabled if no wave selected
• FIx: Initial URL change directly reloads webview

Here the changelog of 0.7:

- Menu 'Close' (Window close via CMD+W)
- Menu 'Print'
- Menu 'Reload', 'Back, 'Forward'
- Menu 'Zoom In/Out', 'Actual Size'
- Find by selection
- Fix: Edit profile and download works
- Fix: wave: URL open at app start

- Growl notification now show up more intelligent,
  not for each change
- Show status in menu bar prefs
- Show Growl notification prefs
- Show badge in dock prefs
- Simple loading progress indicator
- Fix: Warning alert for Google Gears
- Fix: Calls via "wave:" work with closed windows
- Fix: Growl notifications work again