Doing the Wave Using a Site-Specific Browser

Over the last several days, we’ve started experimenting with using Wave to track project communications at Kynetx. We have three waves now with project information in it and have invited the folks who work on those projects to each. I’m not far enough into it yet, to state any thing conclusive, but so far, I’m liking what I see.

Wave’s ability to natively host a collaboratively edited document and tack conversations on any part of them makes it a nice tool for coordinating action and getting reaction to things. I’m not claiming it’s a substitute for traditional project management tools-nothing could be that opaque-but it’s a good way to collaborate.

One thing I found as I started using Wave more frequently each day is that I wanted an app, not a Web site in my browser. My style is to have lots of windows open and a stand alone app just suits that style better.

My immediate thought was the use the excellent Fluid site-specific browser tool to create one. That worked great. You get a complaint that it’s not a supported browser from Wave, but in truth since it’s Webkit-based, it works fine. Devthought has instructions that even include a high-res icon and scripts for placing the new message count on the icon.

Someone mentioned Waveboard, a Google Wave app for OS X on Twitter. As far as I can see, it too is a site-specific browser. That is, it’s using Google’s Web UI, not a native Cocoa UI. Still it seems to work fine.

I’m sure we’ll see other Wave applications spring up over the next while, but for now, this is a perfectly acceptable solution.