2009-08-13 Google Wave settings
Google Wave Developer Preview
tweaking the experience
settings
Notice the avatars in the inbox. There has to be some option to set your
avatar. The options along the top right are not very promising, and the Settings
item on the navigation menu applies to waves, not your account.
The way change your avatar is to click on the small silhouette that is your avatar in the contact box. When you click it, it brings bring up a dialog box that allows you to change your avatar.
When I clicked the Change
Photo
button on that dialog box, I actually got a screen full of settings.
If there is an easier or more obvious way to get to the Google Wave settings page, I have not found it yet. I guess this is something Google will improve before Wave becomes public.
Meanwhile, Wave offers is the Phony Photo Protocol; click on your avatar
in the contact box, then choose Change Photo
in the dialog box, to
discover all the other options hiding behind that choice.
I uploaded an avatar to be recognisable, but also took some time to look through the options.
options
This is what the settings page looks like.
There are quite a few options there. So many that there are multiple tabs. This image show the General tabs, and that is all I’ll briefly discuss here.
language
The first option on the General settings screen is language. Sadly, Google is still not internationally oriented, and their default setting is Amglish. I changed the language to English.
keyboard shortcuts
You can learn a lot about a system by studying its options. One thing I learned about Google Wave is that it has keyboard shortcuts - which are off by default. If you follow the link, you discover that the Google Wave keyboard shortcuts are the same as those for Google Mail.
avatar override
Google Wave allow you to import your own avatar from your local
computer, your Picasa album or the web. That’s nice, but more interesting is
that it allows you to override the
avatars others use; you can choose the avatars you see for your contacts.
If they do not pick an avatar, you can pick one for them. If you do not like
their avatar, you override their choice with your choice.
snippets
Like Google Mail, Google Wave defaults to displaying the subject in bold,
followed by as much of the mail as fits in the remaining space. That part of the
mail is known as a snippet.
You can choose to turn off display of snippets, so that waves in your inbox show
subject lines only.
personal level indicators
You can turn on personal level indicators; a single arrow for
messages that were not just sent to some mailing list, but to you, and a double
arrow for messages that were sent to you only.
That sounds like a very useful feature, right? Yet by default these indicators
are off.
vacation responder
An option that I do not consider Google brightest idea is the vacation responder. Yes, it is what it sounds like, Google Wave has an out-off-office reply option. I guess the benefit of having this built-in is that there will not be a hundred lame add-ons for this, and that a future version of Wave can provide an option to reduce these noise messages to a small icon.
character encoding
A rather weird option is the ability to choose the encoding of your text. That is an option most users do not understand, even many programmers get confused by.
The presence of the option is weird because it seems completely superfluous. Surely all the Google Wave protocols use Unicode, and everything it interfaces with uses Unicode.
Even weirder is that that the
choice is default text encoding
versus UTF-8
. That is sure to
confuse many who might have understood a more sensible name option, because on the web, UTF-8 is the
default! Whoever created this option did not exactly spend time coming up with
the right words.
mobile Wave
Perhaps the most interesting thing on this page is not an option, but one of the tips that may show up below the option box; get Google Wave on your phone’s web browser.
Google Mail
The Google Wave account includes a Google Mail account. That is not the Google Mail account I already had and used to confirm my Google Wave invitation, but a separate one.
Perhaps the extra account is there because it is still a beta, and we are playing in the
Wave Sandbox,
but I had no problem emailing between between the two accounts. I merely noticed a
delay of about half a minute between sending and receiving.
Funny thing is that as soon as I had sent an message, Wave immediately added
my Google Mail contact to my Wave
contact list.
more options
One of the interesting options on the other tabs is the ability to add
additional email accounts to Google Wave and then use these with Google Wave, so
you do not need to change your email address.
The one item I checked as soon as I saw it is the Back to Beta
option; it puts
the Beta back in the Google Mail logo.
Copyright © Tamura Jones. All Rights reserved.