Projects
Mr-Ray gets a basket full of goodies
May 5th
It was just yesterday we were announcing the horde of new features that Mr-Ray is now sporting and he has a few more surprises! Firstly there have been a few bug reports about in-line blips not showing up correctly, but now thanks to some updates to the Wave Robot API we are able bring these to you! To spice your blips up a little bit we are also pleased to announce some formatting! Check out the screenshot below.
We hope you enjoy the new features!
Mr-Ray gets a make over and goes all public
May 3rd
Over the last month we’ve had some amazing feedback from our Mr-Ray users. We’ve also had a few bug reports (thanks keep them coming!) and plenty of feature requests! While we’ve been busy fixing the bugs in the background there haven’t been many new features arriving in the Wave. However today we are pleased to announce some highly requested new features! (If you’ve been following us on twitter or been watching our roadmap you might already know something about these).
Delete support for Mr-Ray users
You’re now able to delete e-mail participants just by clicking the delete button by their name! Simple as 1, 2, 3
Clearer e-mails
We’ve had a lot of feedback about the notification e-mails that you receive from Mr-Ray. People have also requested the ability to be able to add a personalised message to the first notification e-mail.
So based on your feedback and suggestions we have redesigned the notification e-mails and added a tool so you can send a message with the first invitation e-mail. When you add an e-mail participant you’re given the option to add your own personalised message. The message then appears in the invitation e-mail.
The new e-mails are much clearer to read and the information is displayed in a far less cluttered format. The e-mails also contain some brief details about what Mr-Ray and Google Wave are all about. We hope that this new format makes the e-mails less confusing and much easier to read! (Have you also noticed that the friendly display name is shown in the email now as well as the users wave address?)
Want to share a Wave with anyone? Make it public!
Inviting e-mail users into Wave is great but what would happen if you want to embed the Wave onto a webpage, or share it with a huge group of users? Well you could use Google Waves embed functionality but… you need a Google Wave account. Or you did! Now you can make a Wave public with Mr-Ray. Just click the “make public” link, select if you want it read only or editable and forward the link around to anyone who wants it! When someone replies using the public Wave-lite interface they are asked to enter their name then their replies appear in Wave just like a e-mail participants reply would! Awesome!
Making Wave-lite a little friendlier
Okay so Wave-lite isn’t quite as fully feature packed as Google Wave yet, but we are making improvements to bring you new functionality and make it just as useful! One place that Wave-lite was really missing out was the user friendly profile pictures and names. Well not any more! Fire up a new Wave with Mr-Ray and the participants details will be included in the Wave-lite interface. Superb!
So how do I get all these awesome new features?
Easy. Just start a new conversation with mr-ray@appspot.com! If you want to upgrade an existing Wave with Mr-Ray you can do it in just 3 simple steps:
- Delete the Mr-Ray robot (just mr-ray@appspot.com, there is no need to delete all the e-mail participants)
- Edit the blip with the “add e-mail users” gadget and delete the gadget. (Use the drop down menu that appears on the top right of the gadget when you hover over it)
- Add mr-ray@appspot.com again! He will sort the rest out for you!
Have fun and we hope you enjoy the improvements!
P.s. have you noticed Mr-Ray has had a bit of a make over? Check out his posh new logo!
Mr-Ray wins Mashables Google Wave API Challenge!
Apr 22nd
At the beginning of March Mashable launched a Google Wave API Challenge. The challenge was to create an extension for Google Wave using their new API. There were to be 3 voting categories, Most Fun, Most Useful and Best Use of the Embed API. Then one extension would be picked by a judge as an overall winner.
The winners in the peoples choice categories are Texas Holdem Poker for “Most Fun”, Wave Transformer for “Most Useful” and Resourcy for “Best Use of the Embed API”. Finally we are very proud to announce that the overall winning extension chosen by a judge is… Mr-Ray! Mr-Ray allows you to communicate with people still using e-mail from within Google Wave in an almost seamless way. If you haven’t already you should try him out!
For full details on all the entries and winners you should visit Mashables site.
Thanks to everyone who voted for Mr-Ray!
Mr-Ray planned features
Apr 8th
There has been a lot of excitement around Mr-Ray since its release and lots of feature requests. So to keep you up to date with what we are working on we have published our Mr-Ray roadmap. Take a look and see what you think. If you have a feature request why not contact us and we can look at including it into Mr-Ray.
Introducing Mr-Ray. Wav-e-mail integration!
Mar 29th
Google keep telling us that e-mail has been around for 40 years… and it has! Yet despite its flaws it is still here and used by over a billion people. So what makes e-mail so successful? Well the major advantage it has over any other communication platform on the internet is just about everyone has an address. You rarely find a regular internet user who doesn’t have an e-mail address.
So how can Google Wave ever hope to become the de-facto communication platform when only a handful of people have Google Wave accounts? Simple. Show e-mail users what they are missing; show them how Google Wave is better. This is easy for the more savvy computer users… in fact most savvy computer users have probably tried Wave already. But how do we bring it to the masses? Simple! Let e-mail users communicate with Google Wave while ensuring we do this without taking the Wave out of Wave. How can we do this?
We use Mr-Ray.
Who is Mr-Ray? Mr-Ray is the perfect solution to the Wave e-mail (wav-e-mail) communication problem. He allows you to add e-mail participants to a Wave and have them interact with Wave just like they are first class Wave users. It lets people who are not quite ready for Wave get used to it without needing a full blown account.
Mr-Ray is a huge project and is still in early development, we have many new ideas and features that we want to add to Mr-Ray so you can expect to see new updates and features over the coming months. As Mr-Ray is in constant development we do ask at times for you to be patient and if you find bugs, please report them.
For all the details about Mr-Ray including a full video demo visit the Mr-Ray page and have fun with your new wav-e-mail!
Google Announce new API! We give out free guides!
Mar 2nd
Google have just announced their new v2 robot API available for Java and Python! The new api brings exciting and highly requested features including the active API, proxying for and a redesigned event handling mechanism!
Here at wave.to we have been busy playing around with the new API since late last year and we’ve experienced many pleasures and difficulties in developing on the new platform. So to help all you developers out there we have put together a few short guides to get you started! These guides demonstrate performing simple actions with the new API and include everything from creating a simple robot that responds to a users events to proxying for non-wave participants! Best of all these guides are in Java and Python so no matter which flavour of the API you choose there is help there for you! Head over to the new Simple guides for the robot API v2 page to get started and happy developing!
Rssybot 2 moves into testing
Jan 20th
Happy new year to all! (Slightly belated as it may be). A completely new version of Rssybot has just moved into the first stages of testing. Rssybot 2 utilises the new yet to be released Robot API v.2 from google and is the first robot I have coded in python. Stay tuned for it’s initial roll out soon and a source code release!
Rssybot back online!
Oct 25th
After an almost complete re-write Rssybot is back online and functioning correctly. Rssybot is still in it’s infancy though so you may experience bugs and errors. If you do, please contact me so that I can repair the bug.