Google Wave was announced at Google I/O 2009 in May at San Francisco. All developers attending Google I/O were given access to a developer sandbox for Google Wave and everyone left out had been campaigning for an account. Today, at the Google Wave API Hackathon in Mountain View, Google announced that 100,000 Wave Invites will be sent out on September 30th.

The new invites will not be for the developers sandbox but for wave.google.com. It is also assumed that all developers with a sandbox account will also an invite. The Wave team will be focusing on optimization, stability and usability of Google wave until the first official rollout on September 30.

When you embed a wave, only users with developer sandbox accounts and view the embedded waves. Normal users get a message stating that there is wave content on the page and only sandbox users can view it. This causes for a bad end user experience and would prevent developers from enhancing their sites with embedded waves before Google opens Wave for new sign-ups.

Google Wave

To avoid showing this message to normal users, you can hide the div containing the embedded wave and only show it after the wave is successully loaded. You can do this by setting visibility: hidden for the div containing the embedded wave.

<div id="waveframe" style="width: 500px; height: 800px; visibility:hidden;"></div>

Use a callback function when you initialize the wave panel and use the callback function to change the visibility of the div containg the embedded wave.

window.wavePanel.init(document.getElementById('waveframe'), initCallback);
function initCallback() {
  document.getElementById("waveframe").style.visibility="visible";
}

This will improve the user experience by not showing the developer sandbox message to normal users.