Waveboard on the iPhone, Google Wave access slightly better than Mobile Safari
If you're lucky enough to have a Google Wave account, you may be familiar with Waveboard. I started out using Wave via a Fluid SSB, running Wave Growl for Growl notifications and Dock badges. Then I found Waveboard, and it made things smooth enough that I haven't looked at Wave any other way since. So, obviously, I'd been anticipating the iPhone version of Waveboard. It's here, and it's, well, moderately interesting.
The desktop app is essentially a Single Site Browser, like a Fluid app, but it adds handy, Mac-like keyboard shortcuts, Growl notifications, Dock and Menubar notifications, etc. The iPhone app is the same, a webkit browser showing what Google already provides, but there just wasn't as much potential integration to take advantage of on the iPhone. They took advantage of the shake gesture to reload or log out. Websites can be opened in the same browser or sent to Safari. Landscape mode is supported. And you can kind of get push notifications, by using Prowl (which Aron has mentioned before). Setup instructions are available on the Waveboard blog.
That's about it, for now. Google hasn't offered an API, which seriously hampers a developer's ability to do cool things. More features are reportedly in the works, so we'll see if it turns into a truly useful counterpart to its desktop cousin over time.
Waveboard for iPhone is available on the App Store iTunes link for $0.99US. Under a buck, and it might be worth a look for avid Wavers (which I would be, if enough of my clients and cohorts had accounts to make it truly useful).
[via TechCrunch]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
myagci said 2:51PM on 11-04-2009
I use Google Chrome for Waving. Works swell. I mean, it ought to, no?
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edward said 3:11PM on 11-04-2009
I'd love to be added on that list of cohorts. My Google Wave account: edpenano@googlewave.com
WAVE..err Hi!
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spyker said 4:10PM on 11-04-2009
You can achieve the same EXACT results by just adding a bookmark for Google Wave to your springboard, when you launch that there is no menu, and a black bar at the bottom, just like for this crapp. It's pointless to pay $1 for this app....
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KP said 4:46PM on 11-04-2009
I like the desktop app, but I don't see enough motivation to pay for the iPhone app. I may eventually just to support future development, but it sounds like right now there are no APIs to allow 3rd parties to add much beyond what the web app does.
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Josh said 6:04PM on 11-04-2009
If you have an invite to send I would love to have it. joshthepants@gmail.com
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Lan said 8:28PM on 11-05-2009
I'd love an invite as well. Looks very fascinating and might get me to actually drop all my other email clients.. Lanisan@gmail.com
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Aaron said 12:49AM on 11-05-2009
Don't buy this app. It is awful. The inbox loads correctly and looks pretty nice, this gives you the false hope that the rest of the app will follow suit. Unfortunately, as soon as you open a wave you find that it is not formatted for the small screen of the iPhone and when you try to scroll over to the section of the wave that's cutoff, all you get is black. It doesn't load the other part. Attachments don't load, neither do gadgets, nothing really works at all. One would have thought that Apple's stringent approval process would have caught this travesty of an application.
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Brett Terpstra said 9:43AM on 11-05-2009
All true, but this is a result of Google not providing anything else. The app is essentially a webkit browser. I'm not saying that these aren't reasons enough to avoid the app, but you'd run into the same problems using the mobile version in Safari, as well.