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.