Google Gears up with offline access to web applications
– posted May 31st, 2007 by Laurence Veale No comments
The problem with online applications is just that: they’re online. What happens when you’re not connected? What if you’re in transit, on a train or bus or even in the air?
When connectivity drops, so does productivity
For those of you who just have to work while commuting, the lack of connectivity means the loss of productivity.
One of Ireland’s greatest contributors to the blogosphere, Damien Mulley points us to what some of the mobile phone operators are now doing: 3G connectivity - where you bring your connection with you. But sometimes this won’t work.
Take the web offline?
Why not take the web offline with you?
Mozilla, the brains behind the Firefox browser are working on version 3, which looks as if it will enable offline usage of applications. From the Firefox 3 Product Requirements Document:
- Add UI elements for enabling offline app usage
- Add backend elements for offline app support
- Offline web browsing
Google Gears up for offline access
But while all this development is going on over at Mozilla, Google have come out with a browser plug-in called Google Gears which enables web applications to work offline.
Google Reader accessible offline
Although it’s an “open API” (you can develop your own web applications to work with it), they’ve already rolled it out for their own Google Reader and I expect them to do the same for Gmail and Calendar too which would be quite cool.
However, on the development side, would I go ahead and work with Google Gears? I’m on the fence on that. I’d prefer this new functionality to be inherent in my browser, which it should be with Firefox 3.0. However, that’s only Firefox whereas Google Gears plays nicely with Internet Explorer too.
Whatever the case, soon you’ll be able to squeeze more productivity out of your web applications, even when they’re not connected.
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Categories Spotted, Technology
