Hi Uwe, (my apologies for posting part of your reply to the list, but I think it might good if I explain in general why I passed on invitations)
>> Use it or not as you please. My main motivation for giving you the >> invite is that the collaborative aspects with using google wave is >> something I think we in the long run should see what could be useful >> for LyX. > > It seems that you are a so-called "early adopter". Google wave is just > another hype in my opinion. I certainly am an early adopter in the sense that I started with LyX when it was 0.10, and I haven't regretted that. I also started with wikis very early on, which I haven't regretted either. On the other hand, I do try to stay away from facebook and twitter... :-) I've used wave some, at least enough to consider it way more than just hype and I hope LyX can learn from some of the solutions in wave - more on that later. As for wave, I do expect it to subsume the role of e-mail within a few years, initially by acting in parallel, and interoperating, with regular e-mail, but eventually I expect people basically saying that regular e-mail sucks in comparsion with e-mail, primarily for some specific use cases that more often occur in business situations. Having said that, I don't t necessarily expect it to be Google's implemenation that wins in the end, in fact, it might not be until Microsoft implements their own equivalent technology that it takes becomes mainstream. > Imagine that a company names "Where 2 Tech" had > launched Wave, would you then also participate in a beta test program as you > do now? I probably wouldn't have watched the 90 minute "introduction video" if it had been some other company. Then again, I've been interested in collaboration tools since 2002 or so, so I don't really know. However, if I had watched the video i would have tried the tool. Then again, I doubt another company would have gone for the "federation approach" - without that wave won't fly. Any serious (business) use of this technology will only work once "I" am able to run my own server. Some of you might wonder what 'federation approach' means, and simply put it's that the wave protocol is open and that a reference implementation of server and client software will be available for everyone. The comparison is with e-mail, where there are many servers and clients on the the internet that can communicate with each other. > Wave might be useful for companies where > everybody is at least there for 8 hours. But in an open source project, many > of us are only online for a few hours per week because LyX is our hobby not > our work. I don't think the LyX project, or us developers, will have a direct use of Wave at this point in time. That is simly way too soon at this point in time. It certainly won't completely replace e-mails / news for a long while yet. As for version control, that's definitely much better for dealing with documents. I don't even expect waves to even being able to compete with wikis within a year or so. (Maintaining FAQs could be an exception though). There is single major reason for why I wanted other LyXers to see wave, and that is to get a feeling for how the user interface can work when there are multiple authors working on the same document. To get a feeling for how easy, or difficult, it is to work on one document when there are multiple cursors moving around on the screen. In my opinion that seems to work quite well as a concept for a user interface (in practice it's sometimes a bit slow in the wave implemenation). So I am happy if you will just try wave so much so that you try editing a wave while other users are simultaneously editing the same wave. Then think about how this kind of user interaction would work if it was instead done in LyX. Best regards, Christian PS. There is one use case for wave which we would benefit from. If we are to decide on a new LyX meeting, a wave is _perfect_ for discussing where to hold it, and who is coming and all those details.
