If you’ve been lucky enough to get a Google Wave invite you’ll know that while the service shows promise it’s currently painfully slow if you’re running anything other than a powerhouse of a computer.
Even opening a wave can take a few seconds. It’s highly frustrating and means that, for the time being, you probably won’t be keeping Wave opening in a browser tab all the time. The downside here is that you have to keep logging into Wave to check for new messages.
Stepping into save Wave users from this pain is a new Firefox Add-on. The Google Wave Notifier from Chad Smith installs in seconds and sits at the bottom of your browser displaying the number of waves that have updated since your last visit.
Once you’ve entered your login details you can set how often is checks your Wave account for updates. The default is every two hours so you might want to increase that if you’re a heavy user.
As a first release it’s still quite buggy but many Wave users will be glad to have something that means loading up Wave is only something they do when absolutely necessary.
It would be nice to have a push-enabled iphone app for wave too. I guess that Android will be supported first though.
Yes, Wave isn’t as fast as most other webbased apps.
No, it isn’t painfully slow. Most people on this wave https://wave.google.com/wave/#minimized:nav,minimized:contact,restored:search:by%253Ame,restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252BFuB8Ccj8A.4
claim it’s running reasonably fast on most configurations with Chrome. Maybe your browser is slow instead?
Notifier is great!
Google Waves have hit the shores of WiseStamp Firefox addon…got a Wave account?
Check this out ☛http://ow.ly/v4fy
I’ve released a system tray app the does the same thong for those not using Firefox!
http://wavenotifier.dantup.me.uk
If you are looking for a way to get notifications on your Windows or Linux desktop, visit http://wave-notify.sourceforge.net. This application will give popups just like GTalk does.