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.

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.

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!

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:

Just tweet a message with the words ‘waveboard invite‘. Tomorrow at noon in Germany (2009-11-10 12:00) we will turn on the Kosmix Lucky Twit machine and choose 10 winners.

Those winners will be listed at this page and on Twitter @holtwick.

Update: The lucky winners are:

1. @paulysupernova
2. @landrygfx
3. @pepcob
4. @remywriter
5. @sanji
6. @zsafwan
7. @nathangrave
8. @phox081
9. @Er0pb14
10. @dmitryborovoy

Congratulations!