Now I heard about GW early on, but didn’t really make any time for myself to understand the concept, or find out about the inner workings. In fact, like may people I know, I just thought it was an exercise in swapping invites, and once I had one, and had a very quick play, I didn’t get it.

Well, now I’ve read all the documentation, watched the videos, understood the concept, I tend to agree with the team. This could indeed be a gamer changer. We do need something to replace the increasingly old fashion email (40 years old), and this not only does that, but merges in a whole bunch of tasks and possibilities as well. It could be the future.

Now for developers, one of the things that GW comes with is the Wave API. The API allows you to use and enhance GW in a couple of ways. By extensions, or by embedding GW in other web pages.

So in order to understand the API more, I thought I’d build a simple Extension. In this case a robot, that when added to your GW conversation, will remove all the bad words it catches people using. This simple example starts allowing me to understand how the API works, and how I interact with Waves, Wavelets and Blips.

Now, it is a very simple example of what’s possible via the API and what will be possible in GW, but it’s a good example of how you get up and running with the Python SDK. I am of course assuming you have a App Engine account, and downloaded the SDK.

If you’d like to see the robot in action in a wave, just add the contact:

language-timothy@appspot.com

and then add this contact as a participant in your wave conversation you want monitoring. I only tried it in conversation with myself, but I’m sure it’ll be fine. The robot is also in the wave sample gallery.

As always, grab the code over at Github.

• Lightning fast UI
• Lightning fast JS execution thanks to V8
• Lightweight, or at least it gives that impression as the UI is very, very simple
• Stable *well this is to be seen, but each tab running with it’s own process should help*

Now, I don’t think Google built this browser with the main intention of trying to compete with other browser vendors. I think they built it as a UI for all their web apps. If you want to use it to browse other websites, then obviously it does that just fine, but it has been optimised to make Google’s suite of web apps ( Gmail, Calendar, Docs etc ) run super smooth, like desktop apps, and with Gears you can work offline, like desktop apps. You can see this in the design; the V8 JavaScript Engine has been “specifically designed for fast execution of large JavaScript applications”, the fact that each tab runs in it’s own process. If you have Gmail in one tab, Calendar in the other, it’s the same as having two applications open, if one crashes the other one just keeps working fine. The simple UI design. It wants to be as simple as possible, if it’s just a frame for the application inside.

I think that people could end up using Chrome AND another browser in tandem, and just using Chrome for their web/desktop apps ( Email, Calendar etc ). I personally hate mixing my web browsing with email and calendar, it all gets so messy and I like to have that distinction.

I’d be interested in what other people think, and if/how they will use Chrome?

http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=qr&chl=http://whomwah.com&choe=UTF-8&chs=177×177&chld=h|1

Update: They have also released their API to the public at last. You can get an API key here. The documentation is here.

Update: People have been having fun with google maps in the US since they added Keyhole satellite imagery. Here my favourite so far.

If the UK gets added to this mapping system, Muiltimap and Streetmap watch out!