Latelly I’ve been reading a lot about offline web applications, since this is the topic of my final project. I decided to focus on Google Gears for a couple of reasons, the most important being that this API is specifically designed for offline browsing, its new BSD, and it was mine and my boss’s favorite after I presented him all the options I could find (Adobe AIR, Microsoft Silverlight (I couldn’t find good information on taking webapps offline with Silverlight), Mozilla Prism, WhatWG HTML 5 specs.
One thing that I don’t fully understand in Google’s implementation of offline support is the need to press a button to go offline. Why did they use a button?? Imagine that you’re using your laptop, you forget to take Reader offline and next day you find yourself without a connection… Or imagine you are working with intermittent connection but this time you remembered to take Google Reader offline, but now you cannot take advantage of the limited connection you have to get updates; really annoying and frustrating, and Google Docs is also using the same approach.
I know it’s not easy to get rid of the evil “switch-between-online-and-offline” button, but I also know that it is possible, and I would be really nice to see it happen with Google Reader and Google Docs.
When you are working on googledocs with the googlegears extension installed, you don’t have to switch between online and offline mode. The extension does it automatically for you (unlike google reader…). If you lose your net connection, everything’s synced and googledocs will save to your hard drive instead of saving to the cloud. The next time you are online, google docs will sync all the changes to the google data center that stores your docs.
Francis
23 May 08 at 4:29 pm
Thank you for your comment, and you’re totally right… it was my mistake and I edited my post. But that makes my previous question even more pertinent… If Google has done it with google docs, what is stopping them to do the same with google reader?
It happened to me before to find myself without connection, and because I couldn’t predict the loss of connection, I didn’t activate google reader’s off-line mode.
jpcosta
23 May 08 at 5:40 pm
Well, maybe it’s something to do with the nature of those two web apps. GoogleDocs is personal, so all your docs are mirrored on your hard drive as well as in google’s servers. Google Reader doesn’t hold personal data (so it’s different in nature to Google Docs), it’s just a feed reader, so they don’t see any advantage in keeping a copy of the articles you subscribe on your hard drive… Don’t know if that’s the way it is but it makes sense to me…
Francis
23 May 08 at 5:57 pm
I’m trying to understand your point, but I’m stuck with my questions…
We have the ability to use google reader offline, but we must know a priori when you’ll loose connection. And if you’re using the offline mode but you do have a connection, you can’t sync and get any new articles without going online…
IMHO I would like to see google reader working like docs…
jpcosta
23 May 08 at 6:10 pm