Google Wave is not cool

Image by marketingfacts via Flickr

Wave is not cool. At all. The user interface is buggy and unfriendly. A lot of people have been complaining about the search interface - [in:inbox]?!? Furthermore it is absolutely unusable on small displays. One gets the feeling that Wave was designed to be used on a 24″ widescreen display or a larger monitor - future proof. The vertical column design is not really a space friendly solution and there are better options that have been explored by several email/IM/twitter clients.

Can I have a desktop client please?

I love web services but for a communication tool integrated notifications are an absolute must. Waveboard is a partial solution, but still in a very early stage.

If Wave came from a startup

Have you ever asked yourself if you would really be prepared to use Wave if it came form a startup? I would say that a startup presenting a product like wave would be tore apart from the tech blogs (TechCrunch, RWW, Mashable). Most probably they would not even publish a story about it and just ditch it as a crappy real-time hybrid of email/IM and a document collaboration suite. Please comment on this as I would really love to hear if you would be willing to test Wave if it came from a startup (let’s say from Slovenia).

If Wave was a Microsoft product

Now imagine Wave as a Microsoft product. Would you give it a try? Would you be so patient with it as most people are being with Google’s product? I am willing to bet that if Microsoft launched something like Wave there would have been a lot of media buzz and people would try the service, but the feedback would be much worse than with Google. I can see the headlines: “M$ Flops again with a strange service only Ballmer would use!”

The Protocol is Cool

Basically the only part I like about all this Wave thing is the underlying protocol which promises to deliver some interesting use cases if it will be open enough and allow federated waving. From my point of view internal wave clients might be quite useful for communication and brainstorming, however I do not see wave replacing email or IM any time soon.

These are just some of my views summarized in a blog post. Feel free to share your opinion in the comments.

My lightning talk focused on the concepts that led us to Qootia. I tried to emphasize that we can innovate on top of existing technologies and bring compelling usage scenarios on top of good old technology.

The talk apparently inspired some people as I had some fantastic discussions after the talk and in the following two days of the conference.

10 days ago I stopped drinking coffee. This wouldn’t be a worthy news if I wasn’t an avid coffee drinker and a huge Illy fan. I have been drinking between 4 to 6 espressos or cappuccinos per day (not to be confused with the funny American lattes or similar water like coffee). You might imagine that my body was quite used to the daily dose of caffeine.

Why quit?

Why would one stop drinking coffee completely? Well coffee is a drug by definition, and a very addictive one.

Caffeine is a bitter, white crystalline xanthine alkaloid that is a psychoactive stimulant drug. Source

Secondly I often found myself jaded and intoxicated by caffeine. Something had to be done, so I decided to stop drinking coffee - totally stop.

Consequences

Day 1 - Terrible

My head was on the verge of explosion at about 10AM (I usually had 2 espressos before 10AM). At 1PM it was getting really painful. I had to go home at 5PM and have an aspirin. I went to bed at 9PM and slept for 10 hours. I drank loads of water and natural juice to fight the suffer.

Day 2 - Please kill me now

Same story again. Headache before noon. Headache in the afternoon. As avid coffee consumers might know - the coffee after lunch is really hard to miss. Juice, water and chocolate did not help much. I was on the verge of letting go and grabbing a coffee, but I resisted. Went to bed at 10, slept for 10 hours.

Day 3 - Not so bad

Nice day. Headache was gone. My thoughts were getting clearer and I did not suffer anymore.

Day 4 - Last kick

My thoughts got incredibly clear. I was able to start the day normally at 7:30AM and work normally for almost the whole day. The only moment of weakness was right after lunch, but a glass of natural juice helped. Sleep back to normal 7 hours.

Day 5 - Free at last

Waking up was quite easy. Easier than in times when I was drinking coffee. Eyes wide open after just a few minutes are not a problem any more.

Day 10 - This is great

After 10 days I feel like a totally different person. Free of an addiction, and with clearer thoughts and a huge creativity boost.

What now?

I definitely intend to drink coffee in the future, but not for power boost effects. I intend to enjoy its psychoactive stimulant effects and the great taste a good espresso has (of course it must be Illy) approximately once or twice a week - as a special occasion.

As you might have read I attended Over the Air with Anze. In this post I want to share some insights from the hack competition that took place on the night form Friday to Saturday.

The Idea (16:30 - 16:45)

The idea was developed during a talk about computer vision, face recognition and augmented reality. The talk was interesting, but I’ve seen most of those things before - while I was researching AR about a year and a half ago. I was thinking about an application that might come handy during the conference. Since free beer and wine were on the menu later on, it was easy to come to the conclusion - a drink counter! But a drink counter is not really useful, except for preventing headaches. It needed an intelligent function that would really solve a common problem or prevent unwanted behavior. We decided that adding the function of calling a local taxi company would be great - we would nudge drunk people to leave their car and call a cab with a single tap.

The Design (16:45 - 17:30)

Since we were very tight on time we skipped the paper sketches and went straight to Fireworks for a high fidelity mockup and functionality test. Fireworks is a great tool for quick prototyping because of its Pages, States and Events. The final design was created in about 30 minutes - during those 30 minutes we went through about 4 versions and improved the usability and positioning of elements. The final design looked like this:

Drinkr - Application Flow

As you might have noticed we had the user in mind while designing this application. The dot to increase the counter keeps on growing for each drink the user has. Furthermore the text gets blurred in order to work as a “drunkenness meter”. At any stage the user can exit the counter and call a taxi nearby, but after 10 drinks the game is over, as the app asks the user if she is still standing - we though it was a good joke :)

The Development (22:00 - 03:20)

After dinner, a few beers and some jelly with vodka with a bunch of really cool people we went on to code the application. While sitting on beanbags, Anze decided we would use PhoneGap (we never used it before) as the basic framework for the application. PhoneGap was a smart decision because it allows you to develop and deploy a native application by using web technologies - HTML, CSS, JavaScript. We developed a basic web application first and compiled it for the HTC Hero, Android device we had with us.  The development proceeded quite smoothly, except for some GUI glitches that we needed to fix. We finished at around 3:20 AM and left with a taxi, to catch some sleep at the hotel.

The Presentation (14:30 - 14:35)

Apparently we were the first to fill out the application form, so we were the first on stage. The event organization was flawless - we were able to use a camera to show the application running straight on the device and show it on the big screen. I had a great time presenting as the crowd laughed at the ergonomic growing dot, blurry help text and funny prompt at the final stage.

Other teams at OTA presented some really stunning hacks - I loved the BlueBell hack from Future platforms - an audible and visible display of bluetooth signals in the room.

The Awards (16:00)

Drinkr was selected as one of the winners, even if we were not aiming for a prize. Our primary goal was to have fun, create a functional application and make the audience laugh. We would like to thank the organizers and Vodafone for the cute netbook, we nicknamed Victoria.

We are planning to finish and polish the application this week and release it to the Android market as an experiment.

London again - after only two weeks I returned to London, this time around my trip is much more business focused. Yesterday I attended the TC London party (part of Seedcamp week) along with Anze. The event was really nice, with a huge number of interesting people packed in (probably) one of the fanciest clubs in London - Cafe Paris - just a couple of meters from Piccadilly Circus. A point worth mentioning is that I meet up with 7 other (yeah nine in total!) Slovene people at this party. As Andraz twitted later, this is an impressive figure - if Slovenia had the same population as China, there would have been 6055 Chinese at that party. Imagine that :)

The main reason of our trip to London wasn’t the TC Party. We came mainly for Over The Air, a fantastic conference / hackathon. The day was packed with sessions about mobile development and design. We met many interesting people with various backgrounds - designers, mobile developers, mobile operators employees… After dinner (and a few beers) most of the people started working on their micro-projects which have to be delivered by Sunday morning (in 1 night). While I am writing this (it’s 23:33), Anze is hacking our little cute application. I delivered the design a couple of minutes ago and now I am just cheering and helping out with small irrelevant tasks, sipping coffee and answering to emails.

To sum this up - London is just great. I am getting to love this city.