OK, I just participated in my first multi-person edit of a Google Wave and I must say that is cool. My Team Lead asked me to provide my comments on an email from our customer and send it to her so she could add her comments. So, I started a new wave, pasted the original email in and invited her to the wave. We were both able to edit the email at the same time, format the text and then copy/paste it into a Lotus Notes email. It kept all the text formatting with no problems. We figured it would loose the formatting in the copy/paste exercise. It would be nice if an email option was available to email part or all of a wave. But, that's something a gadget may be able to add in the future or it may be added natively, who knows at this point.

For the most part editing of the wave went pretty quickly and without too much trouble. We did encounter a couple of errors while we were both editing at the same time. An error was produced at the top of the page with a field to enter what you were doing when the error occurred. Click submit to send the error on to Google (I assume) and a refresh button is provided. Click refresh and nothing was lost, the wave still had the edits we both had done up to the error, which to me was pretty impressive error handling.

While for one man shops and very small companies I really don't see that big of a use for Google Wave, but for corporations or large teams who collaborate on documents, brain storms, code and emails this is an awesome tool. It just needs to come out of preview mode.

In an LA Times article Google states

We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites

We're continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it's a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers.

I know that they say they will continue to support Gears so that it doesn't break applications, but for how long? I don't personally use Gears nor have I written any applications using Gears but I do know some of the Lotus Bubble bloggers have.

I downloaded the Chrome OS image the other day and started playing around with Chrome OS. I installed the image into Virtual Box and it runs fine, I wasn't so lucky with Parallels. So far, the OS is very minimal, not really a whole lot to play with. It's basically just the Chrome browser running everything. If you close all the browser tabs, it relaunches the browser. The OS itself is very clean looking and minimalistic, which seeing as how it's from Google, would you expect anything else? As for the apps, seems that they are only links to web applications but the ability to add more has been disabled, at least from the application menu. I tried adding an icon to the application menu to no avail. There are no right-click contextual menus except your normal browser/web page menu options. As for the speed of the OS, it boots up really fast. I would say only about 5 to 7 seconds from the time I turn on the Virtual Machine until a login screen is presented. Once you login with a google account maybe only another 1 to 3 seconds before you're in the browser ready to work. That kind of start up speed is very impressive and I hope will set the standard for other OSes to follow suit.

There really isn't a whole lot to talk about at this point in time concerning Chrome OS other than I will be following the progress closely as I'm a fan of the Google line of products. But without further ado, here's some screen shots I captured:

[Edit 12/04/2009 - Moved images. Click Read More for images]
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