Live wallpapers are similar to a normal Android application as they have access to all the facilities of the platform, such as OpenGL (3D drawing), GPS, accelerometers, network access, etc). While the real purpose of live wallpaper is to create fun and interesting user experiences, there are some that are really beautiful, and at best, stunning

Note: Running live wallpaper can be resource intensive. I have not run thorough tests, but my phone loses its charge in about 30% less time with a live wallpaper running. Some live wallpapers are also more process intensive than others and this may be another factor in the battery drain issue.

1. Mario

AppBrain | Market Link

The wonderful developers at xda-developers.com created this geeky and nostalgic live wallpaper. It features Mario playing randomly generated levels which restart if Mario dies.

This wallpaper feature a number of options including the ability to “skip” the current level being played and various other technical settings (such as the number of frames per seconds and the level of priority given to the wallpaper with respect to the other apps on your phone).

The developers have also added an unique function which allows you to switch between “Playback mode” and “AI mode“. While the former saves battery, the latter allows you to select the path Mario should take, i.e. an easier path or a harder path.

You can’t really play Mario with this live wallpaper, nor is there any interactive elements, but it is still fun to see the classic characters running around in your screen.

QR code:

2. Aquarium

Free: AppBrain | Market Link (requires Android 2.2 or higher)

Paid: AppBrain | Market Link

This soothing live wallpaper displays fishes and coral gliding in and out of your home screen. This is probably one of my favorite live wallpaper as it fades into the background and does not disturb the visual experience when using your phone.

Double-tap on any part of the screen to feed the fish!

QR code:

3. The Matrix

AppBrain | Market Link

Although, it has been over a decade since the film The Matrix hit the big screens, the images of unintelligible code flashing on a computer screen is still an iconic symbol of geekdom. The Matrix live wallpaper brings this cultural phenomenon to the mobile platform.

The wallpaper allows you to customise the colour, speed and size of the code.

Touch your home screen to watch “The Matrix” glow!

QR code:

4. Fireworks

AppBrain | Market Link

This is a truly beautiful live wallpaper and it is especially perfect for situations where you want a darker theme on your phone.

Again the developers have left a dearth of options to tweak how you want your fireworks to look. You are able to change the height, depth, size and colour of the fireworks and you are also able to select the type of fireworks displayed, i.e. a star, sunburst or heart pattern.

QR code:

5. Earth

AppBrain | Market Link

The Earth live wallpaper displays a planet rotating slowly over a star field. There are a number of planets available including fictional ones from the Star Wars, Star Trek, Futuruma and various other universes. You can even set it to ordinary spherical objects such as a football.

You are able to customise the position and location of the globe, the ability to interact with the globe (for example rotating it manually), and whether you want the globe displayed on a star field.

QR code:

6. Wave

AppBrain | Market Link

The Wave live wallpaper uses your phone’s accelerometer to change the display on the screen, so by rotating your phone you can watch the waves shift and the ship move across the screen.

QR code:

BONUS: Maps

I am not a big fan of this live wallpaper but some friends swear by it. The Maps live wallpaper shows your current location on a Google Maps layout as your wallpaper.

This is useful as it saves you having to open the Maps application, however it also means that the wallpaper will use the GPS to find your location every time you move, sapping your battery.

Tapping on your home screen gradually zooms in on your location from a continent view straight down into the street. You can also set the type of map you want to view (e.g. satellite, “normal” – i.e. roads, and terrain) and whether you want to view traffic indicators.

This wallpaper comes pre-installed with every Android phone running 2.1 and above.

Update: Thanks to Jack Nathen for informing us about this great wallpaper. How on hell did we miss this out?

aCircuit Board

Have you found any other live wallpapers that are worth sharing?

The parts of the page which you can configure easily are tabs and gadgets.

Gadgets

Gadgets are the little windows that contain information such as RSS feeds, information, games, applications, notifications and just about anything you can cram into it. The gadgets can be expanded to a larger window if you would like to see more information.

The RSS function is very handy if you don’t have a feed reader you frequent. In many cases you can quickly add the feed to your iGoogle page by clicking on the subscribe to RSS link. This will put a new gadget on your page and be updated with the 3 most recent updates.

To save you from needing a bunch of apps open or toggling through multiple tab or windows in your browser, you could add gadgets for your social networking and bookmarking sites.

Take a look in the gadget directory for some ideas of things to add.

Adding Tabs

Adding a whole new tab gives you a clean slate to add new gadgets. Grouping similar gadgets in the same tab creates a smoother less distracting homepage. Many of the Google applications have a gadget. Gmail, Calendar, Docs and even Waves can be viewed on your homepage. This can save a little time jumping from page to page looking to see what’s new.

One good example of new tab full of gadgets making things easier is when you add Google Webmaster tools. It adds a new tab and a gadget for each of the webmaster options.

Google Wave

Adding a Wave gadget is a little bit of work, but it can be done. It took a little bit of digging to find one that worked reliably. These steps are the easiest way I could find to add a Wave.

The first thing you will need (aside from a Wave account) is the Wave gadget; you can download it here.

Next you will need to add Embeddy@appspot.com to your Wave contacts. Do this by clicking on the [+] next to your picture at the top of the wave you want to embed. A window will pop up asking who you would like to wave with; add Embeddy@appspot.com.

When you add the embeddy bot to the wave you want to embed, a little window will appear inside the first post. This window will have code in it as well as some options. The information you will need from the code is the wave ID. It should look like this googlewave.com!w+BiuBl1Oo1A

Copy the wave ID and go back to the settings for the wave gadget on your iGoogle page.

Paste the ID information in the spot [Wave ID] replacing the existing information. In the [Wave Path] field, enter in the following exactly as shown. If you don’t use the https or the last slash, it does not work. https://wave.google.com/wave/

After you save it, the gadget should reload and your wave should appear. At this point you can close the embeddy window because you do not need anymore information from it. Your wave should operate the same as it does in it’s original location.

Backing Up and Restoring

Backing up and restoring your tabs is a good idea if you have several set up for specific uses. To back up or restore your information manually, click on the dropdown arrow to the left of the active tab name.

Click on [Edit this tab] and scroll all the way to the bottom. You will see the last automatic back up time along with an option to back up or restore your iGoogle settings to your computer.

Click [Export] and save the XML file to your “in case of a crash” folder.

Do you have a good assortment of gadgets on your iGoogle homepage or do you use something totally different?

image credit HK-DMZ

Below are the most popular desktop applications and plug-in for Google Wave. Now keep in mind, Wave is very simple and doesn’t have a lot of bells, whistles and blinky lights, so the applications don’t really have a lot to work with just yet. I am sure later on, more apps and more features will be available.

1. Waver

Waver is an Adobe Air app, making it the only cross platform app of the bunch. It offers the same basic functionality as going to the site, just in a smaller stand alone window.

Using the two buttons and the search bar, you can manage your contacts, view lists of Waves, create new and reply. There is a search bar just like in Gmail and the same types of search shortcuts.

All of these are pretty much just like you have on the site. The main difference, is you only have one window, whereas the Wave site has multiple panes.

2. Google Wave Add-On

The Firefox add-on is what I use most frequently. It is very basic and more of a notifier/shortcut link than anything.

The add-on resides in the statusbar. When one of you have a new or updated Wave in your inbox, it will display the unread count. To get to your Wave inbox, simply double click the icon; that’s it.

In the settings menu, all there is to adjust is the intervals when it checks for updates, the timeout and your username and password.

3. Waveboard

Waveboard is a Mac only desktop application. It is another simple application that allows you to access your Waves in an identical stand alone screen. There really isn’t any noticeable difference between the web app and Wakeboard aside from the Growl-like notifications. An iPhone app on the way.

This application is a lot like using the next one on the list.

4. Fluid

Fluid (Mac only) isn’t specifically a Wave desktop application, however is does give you all of the same functionality you would get from going to Google Wave’s web page.

If you would like to read more, here is a post from last spring that will explain it a little more in depth.

In a nutshell, Fluid allows you to “separate” a web page from your browser and turn any web app or web page into a desktop app. It even adds a Dock icon. By doing this, the new “application” functions like the web application, but doesn’t need a browser.

As you can see, this will give you all of the functionality of Google Wave, because it IS Google Wave.

Conclusion

All-in-all, these applications are pretty simple. Not because they aren’t doing exactly what you need them to do, it’s because there isn’t a lot to spice up yet. I can see things getting very interesting later on when more people start adopting and defining clear uses for the infant collaboration tool.

What do you think the future applications will need to offer to make your Wave-ing easier?

image credit San Diego Shooter

Message Management

One of GMail’s strengths is its ability to handle large volumes of email while allowing you to keep things organized. Wave built on GMail’s experience and has also included some useful features for keeping things in order. For starters, you’ve got Folders which work like GMail’s labels and everything else’s… well… folders. You can drag and drop waves into these folders and they will not show up in your inbox. To view that message you can either click the title of the folder or choose All at the top of the Navigation pane.

As you can see in the screenshot, you can also colorize each of the folders individually. I can see how this could be helpful if you have a LOT of folders and want to use colors to group them together, or if there’s a particular folder you want to keep highlighted to catch your eye.

In addition to managing waves through folders, you also have two ways to essentially forget about a message until it’s needed. First, you can Mute a wave, so that it no longer shows up as unread even when it has been modified by others. If you just want a wave out of your inbox but still want to know when it’s been updated, you can Archive that message. You won’t see it until someone makes an update to that wave. Both muted and archived waves will show up in searches and in the All section.

I’ve found it useful to archive almost everything. When a wave has pretty clearly ended, I’ll set it to Archive and leave only messages I intend to keep alive in my inbox. If anyone happens to update one of those waves, it’ll pop right back up in my inbox like normal. Without this I think it wouldn’t take long for Wave to feel a bit overwhelming, if you use it frequently.

Embedded Replies

One messaging feature I really like is the ability to embed a reply inside the original message. In this example, Tara wrote the original message, and instead of creating a separate reply or copy & pasting her words, I can choose any spot in her message and insert my reply.

Private Branches

Let’s say you’re in a wave with everyone at the office. Your boss is discussing the importance of TPS reports. Suddenly, a witty remark pops into your head, and you have a choice. Do you uphold your status as the office comedian, or bite your tongue to keep your job? Wave provides a third option – create a private branch. Only the people specified in that branch can see those messages. In this example screenshot, there are many people in the wave but only the person I included in my private reply can see what I wrote.

Managing Contacts

The only really notable feature about the contacts is that you can do an incremental search for people in your contact list, as demonstrated below. My only complaint is that Wave does not apparently include GMail type status messages with the contacts. I’ve seen no word so far on whether or not that will be a feature in future Wave revisions.

Extensions

We covered extensions briefly in our first report on Wave, but there’s plently more to be said. Extensions can be installed and removed through the Extensions Gallery, which is a wave itself. For me, the extension gallery showed up in my inbox the day after I activated my Wave account. In it is a list of available extensions you can choose to install.

One of the most notable aspects of Wave in regards to extensions is they Google strongly encourages independent developers to create their own Wave extensions. The recommended language is Java but they also have a Python client library. As a fan of Python I think this is great news.

Bottom Line

With the many clever options Wave provides for message management and extensions, Wave is clearly going to be a contender for online communications. Right now the biggest obstacle is establishing a firm user base, as Wave is only useful if all your friends and associates also use it. Leaving the system open will work to Google’s benefit in that sense, as future users won’t be limited to just the official Wave website and client, but will be able to communicate over any wave-compatible platform. I, for one, look forward to seeing what the future holds for Wave.

So what is it exactly?

According to Google:

Google Wave is an online tool for real-time communication and collaboration. A wave can be both a conversation and a document where people can discuss and work together using richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

Intriguing, but not very specific. Suffice it to say, each “Wave” is like an email thread or message board post. The difference is that you’re not just posting a series of replies (though you certainly can use it that way), you’re making changes to a single document. Each change becomes a branch of the original message. You can roll a wave back in time to see how the conversation has evolved. If you get added to a pre-existing wave, you get the whole thing – the document (or thread) as-is, along with its entire history. Waves can be embedded into blogs, so any time a change is made to that wave it can show up in something like Blogger in near real time. We’ll cover the most interesting Wave features in more detail as we go.

Using a Wave

The Wave exists online, and can be accessed a few different ways. The most common would probably be through a “Wave Client”, ie a GMail-like web app that displays your Waves in the browser window. Here is an example of the main wave.google.com

On the far left we’ve got a pretty familiar webmail style menu, with the usual Inbox, etc. Below that is your contacts. Wave seems to have imported my GMail contacts and added those who are also signed in here. The center pane shows your message history much like any email client, including the pic for each participant in the wave.

Things get more interesting when we get to the right pane. Here we can view, edit, and create waves. In this example, I wrote a Kurt Vonnegut quote to Crystal. She responded not by creating a separate reply, but by editing my original words. When I get back to Wave and see her message, Wave highlights the changes she has made.

This means you could use a single wave to have multiple people, say, write a paper for school or collaborate on a family Christmas list. All changes are essentially real time, each change creating a new branch with a complete backup history. In fact, Wave provides a playback feature that allows you to step through the document from creation to the present.

Extensions

Wave expects and encourages user-developed extensions. As it’s still in development, there aren’t many choices yet. The extensions that do exist are all fairly useful. First, you can perform a Google search and include the results in the wave. No real surprises there.

Next is the single-click Yes/No box. Of all the things to include in an early release I’m a little surprised the Yes/No box was one of them, but I suppose it demonstrates some of the things you can do with extensions.

The results were unanimous.

There is also a Maps extension, which is another single click surprise. I have to admit, this would make it a lot easier to exchange directions.

As I write this, a new wave just arrived in my inbox for the Google Wave Extension Gallery. I can browse and install new extensions from within the wave. Presumably the wave will be updated as new extensions come out.

Conclusion

There is FAR more to Google Wave than I could possibly cover here, and this is still a fairly early development version. For those who want all the details, you can find a LONG (80 minutes) video of the tech demo here. For something with so drastically different from email on the technical side, Wave manages to feel surprisingly comfortable. The technology is certainly impressive, and it’s easy to adjust to the Wave way of doing things once you’ve spent a few minutes using it. As for usefulness, that’s a little harder to judge. From what I’ve seen, Wave only works if everyone else is also using it. As great as the map feature may be, the recipient would of course need to be a Wave user as well. Not that this is a flaw in Wave exactly, but it does place a limit on how useful it can be. I think it’s got a lot of potential, and I’ll be keeping a Wave tab open for a while to see how things go, but I won’t go closing my webmail tab just yet.