As you can probably tell by my recent posts, I've been mucking about with Google Wave for the last week or so. It shows a lot of promise, but we still need to work out the best way to use it.
Some colleagues and I were discussing some practice development the other day. One of them said that they had created a mind map on mind42.com and had shared it with us so that we could map out some ideas. Mind42 is a great tool and normally I would jump straight on it, but it seemed unnatural to leave the context which we had created in the wave. It would have been much cooler if we could have had the mind map directly in the wave.
Google has thought of this, and have included the ability to incorporate gadgets into your wave, which allow essentially any web application to participate in waves. A Mind map is a natural tool to include in waves as it forms the start of a lot of collaborations, which is exactly what wave is for. Rather than wait for mind42 to change their application so that it could be embedded in google wave, I decided to write my own. Mind maps are relatively straight forward applications, and I wanted an excuse to use GWT in anger.
The result is my newly released google wave component. I've uploaded it to the Google Wave samples gallery, but if you have access to the wave preview then you can go directly to the source (With a sample) at this wave link. Install, have a play, and make suggestions for improvements. I'm hoping we'll start using it within our organisation as well.
Here's a video of it in action:
Monday, November 2, 2009
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Cool Major stuff!! Thanks for creating and sharing that tool. I'm a mindmap lover, and i was seriously wondering how that would go with google wave. You solved it! Congratulations, and congratulations again for the speed at which you got there.
ReplyDeleteHow do I install the gadget please I am new to google wave and just have a preview invite
ReplyDeleteHi harvey, did you try the link to the wave in the article. The wave has got an extension installer, which gives you a button that "installs" the gadget. Once you've done that there is a little icon that gets added to your editing toolbar (it looks like a little red cactus) which when you click on it adds a mind map to your wave.
ReplyDeleteIf you still have problems, start a wave with me (brucejcooper@googlewave.com) and I'll show you how to do it step by step. Have fun!
What are the keyboard shortcuts. I've figured out that "i" adds a new node, "e" allows you to edit and "j", "k" and "l" traverse the map. Are there other keyboard shortcuts that we should know about? How do you add nodes to the left of the central node? Mine seem to all flow to the right.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
Have you looked at the example waves. There are two, depending on whether you only have sandbox or "full" preview access.
ReplyDeletesanndbox: https://wave.google.com/a/wavesandbox.com/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,restored:wave:wavesandbox.com!w%252B-nWLyah2D
preview: https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BWJ6O0jdYA.1
They spell out all the existing keyboard shortcuts, as well as explaining why layout to the left of the root node was removed. This was done in order to stop maps taking up too much space horizontally. Wave isn't very good at using horizontal space, so the layout was changed. A lot of people have complained about this though (actually a lot of people compain no matter what I do :)) so it will be coming back as an option in the next release.
I hadn't seen the example waves. Thanks for the links! Also, great job on the gadget, very cool!
ReplyDeleteA wonderful great app. i will use it very often in the future. Thank you.
ReplyDelete