Fooling around with Wave

I’ve received two e-mails from Google today. They’re both regarding Wave. First, there’s the e-mail saying that my name was put forth by a Googler (thank you to the chap from #hacklabto, you know who you are) for a developer sandbox account and please fill out this form with your desired usernames. The next was saying that I was accepted into the preview. Sorry, my invites are already spoken for.

After a bit of play with Wave my first instinct is that it’ll be great for collaborating on taking class notes. The problem is that most of my class notes involve pretty big formulas. The solution? I’m writing a gadget that takes in LaTeX code and returns a PNG suitable as a blip. I’ll be using LatexRender for that part. The downside that I can immediately see is that most of my lecture halls don’t have wifi signal, but maybe releasing the gadget will be useful to someone out there.

I don’t yet have my developer sandbox account but I’m working with the Wave gadgets tutorial. It looks like an AJAX-enabled textbox will do the trick. The state handler will check if there’s a pre-rendered PNG; if so it’ll display that, and if not it’ll query the PHP script. I’m hoping that I’ll be able to instead replace the gadget with the static PNG render once the editing of the Wave is done but I haven’t discovered the hook for that yet. I also hope that the state handler will be called immediately after init, and I think that’s the case, but judging from the documentation I’m not entirely sure.

I’m hoping to have a simple version of the gadget that just takes LaTeX within two weeks of getting my sandbox. The pipe dream feature would be a WYSIWYG editor that outputs LaTeX, so for the foreseeable future I’ll just be copying and pasting from LyX.

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One Comment to “Fooling around with Wave”

  1. Chris Smith 16 October 2009 at 8:36 am #

    I never thought about taking collaborating with Wave for class notes. That’s a very good idea.

    Aside from that, I’ve wanted to take notes in classes with my laptop for the last couple of semesters, but for math classes, I find it extremely difficult. Do you just write out the formulas with a formula editor then paste into whatever program you are using? Do you write them by hand and scan them in?

    I feel like that is the only thing holding me back from digitalizing my school experience.

    Other than that, these are some really good ideas for Wave, man. Good luck developing them and thanks a lot (you know why!).


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