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CompleteCarl Varney · 1y ago

Organizing Waves and Better Sharing needs to be a priority

I've been using Wave for awhile now and I find myself looking for alternatives because Wave lacks basic organization features. Yes, you can create folders, but you cannot see which Waves are in folders and more importantly, which Waves are NOT in any folders from the main screen. Every single Wave you've ever created is just listed on the "All" screen with no visible folder tags or clues about whether or not you've put each Wave in a place where you can find it again when you need it. Furthermore, sharing Waves is problematic. Sharing via email just puts all the text into an html formatted body of the email. No text file attachments or audio attachment. Sharing to Google Drive is particularly troublesome. Here are the steps I use to share a Wave to my Google Workspace Drive from Wave for iPhone: 1. Open the session in Wave 2. Tap the Share icon 3. Tap "Share to Google Docs" (I use this because it seems the only way to share the Summary text and the full Transcript text at the same time) 3. iPhone pops up "Wave wants to Use "google.com" to Sign in". Tap "Continue" 4. "accounts.google.com" slides up. Tap my work account. 5. "Wave wants to access your Google Account". Must scroll down to see buttons. Then tap "Allow". [NOTE THAT using the Google Docs option, you will not be presented with the location to save it to. It will just save it to your "My Drive"] 6. Wait for upload, then pops up "Export Successful" dialog. Tap "Close". 7. Tap "Share Audio". Wait while "Preparing Audio..." 8. iPhone share sheet pops up. I have to scroll left to get to my "Google Drive" icon (depends on how you organize your share sheet) 9. Top "Drive" icon. 10. Upload dialog slides up. You may have to tap "Account" and choose from your list of accounts (it defaults to the last account used). 11. You COULD tap the "Folder" and navigate your way to the place you actually want to store the file, but the number of taps could be significant and this upload fails half the time and forces you to start over. That's why I just leave it on the default "My Drive", since that is also where the Google Doc went. 12. Tap "Upload" in the upper right corner. 13. USUALLY the first attempt to upload fails and you get the "Upload Failed" dialog. Tap "Close" 14. Back to Share Sheet. Scroll to and tap "Drive" icon again. 15. If account settings and Folder settings are correct, tap "Upload" again. [REPEAT 13-15 for each time the upload fails] [Then REPEAT ALL STEPS for each Wave you want to upload. You have to re-approve the app with Google EVERY SINGLE TIME.] 16. Go to Google Drive and move the files to where I want them. I realize some of these steps are required by Apple and/or Google. But is there no way to: 1. Authenticate with Google ONCE for the Wave App while you have it open. Then upload all the waves you need to upload without having to go through the authentication screen every single time? 2. Better yet, can we have a "select" checkbox in the Wave list that lets us select and upload multiple Waves at once? Maybe in a zip file, even? 3. There really needs to be a single-tap way to share the text summary, the text transcript (either in one text file or two), AND the audio at the same time. Then all could be uploaded to Drive and it would be worth the time to choose the final location in the Upload dialog. 4. Best option would be to allow users to choose where they store their waves by default. Either in Dropbox or Google Drive or iCloud. Even if it is in iCloud Drive, I can open that folder on my computer and drag multiple wave audio and text files to Google Drive at once, which would be a better experience than what is currently offered. Thank you.

2 comments

  • Paul Hess1y ago

    Carl, thanks for your thoughtful post. I 100% agree, especially the part about the frustration of not being able to organize. It's the most active users who are most penalized by this because they have the most need to organize things. If organizing into folders were less frustrating, Wave could start to enable amazing value-added features like AI discussions within the context of an entire folder instead of just one meeting. I submitted this suggestion well over a year ago, and it's been sitting in the planned roadmap but not happening. The idea is a quick, easy-to-implement filter button at the top of the all wave screen to show us the ones that still need to be filed. https://waveapp.canny.io/feature-requests/p/filter-on-all-waves-screen

  • Carl Varney1y ago

    Update: Josh Mohrer reached out to me directly to further discuss this. I thank him for his prompt attention. In the meantime, I have some updates: 1. I discovered that the iPhone app does have the ability to select multiple Waves at once and perform actions on them, including "Move to folder". I had not previously discovered this. You tap an hold on a wave and a popup menu includes the "Select" option, which, once tapped, will put checkboxes next to every Wave in the current list for selection purposes. 2. I tried a number of alternative apps and found none that were as good at summaries as Wave, at least for my purposes. Also, none did any better when it came to exporting/sharing/uploading, i.e. no export of all three elements at same time (summary, transcript, audio). Perhaps creating a zip archive of files is not something that can be done on iPhone? 3. Instead of using share to Google Docs option, which I used because it combined the summary and transcript into one action, I found it might be easier to share summary and transcript separately via the iOS share sheet. Sharing to Google Docs requires that you reauthenticate with Google every time, but sharing the text files individually via share sheet does not. The only issue is that sharing via share sheet still tends to fail much of the time, but this may be out of the developer's control.