Google Gears – Offline web applications

30May/072

Google Gears – Offline web applications

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life – Google Gears: Offline Support for AJAX/Flash Apps: “”

Dare Obasanjo talking about Google Gears, which enables web applications working against it’s Javascript API to be used offline.

It may prevent other developers from adopting the technology but I doubt many developers would look this gift horse in the mouth, after all it is freaking offline support for Web apps.

Welcome to the future.

Which future, the one where we run applications on our desktop when we aren’t connected to the internet?

See, taking a web application offline isn’t as neat as it sounds. Why would I want to work with my document using Google docs offline when I could just edit it using MS Word and upload it later? Why would I want to use Google Reader offline when I have NetNewsWire or RSS Bandit? If I’m going to work with data offline, I sure don’t want to use a browser interface. I want something that’s snappier, richer, and mo’ better. I want a desktop application.

If you want to see the future, look to the hybrid applications that Brent Simmons talks about. These applications work with data online but run on the desktop. Most of them have an offline front end as well as a web based front end. Twitter is a good example of this. You can choose a Twitter client to run on your desktop but if you are on the road or don’t have access to a desktop you can use the web interface. But Twitter is a pretty trivial example. No one will fail or succeed based on access to Twitter.

No the real future of applications, in my opinion, is found at Zoho.com. Zoho Writer and Sheets provide plug-ins for MS Office which let you work with the documents directly on their servers. If you need to go offline you can just save the document to your hard drive and re-save it back to their servers when you get connected again. They hit the same sweet spot that Twitter does in terms of access. Work with your rich client when you’re at your home base, work with the web client when you’re on the road or in a pinch.

I’m still struggling to see the benefit to taking a web application itself offline?

Edit: Mason Lyngby has posted a response.

Filed under: General Leave a comment

http://www.vixen.com/blog Morgan

Greetings,
If you find no use in web apps, you’ll find no use in this. If you find web apps to be of incredible value (like I do), then this will be a great feature.

Some of us are not tied to a single platform, or even computer. I really like the idea that my work desktop, home desktop, and laptop all share access to the same apps. Since those are (respectively) Linux, Windows, and Mac, that’s a little difficult to do.

The only problem is offline, which for me is mainly when I’m on my Mac. I already like the ability to pull down my Google Reader feeds, for example, and read them offline. (Read: as soon as I leave this hotel room.) Once I’m home again, I’ll my laptop’ll synch all the things I’ve read to the Google Reader, and I can sit down at my Windows box, and *poof*, they’re all already marked as read. That’s why I stopped using NNW, even though I bought it at one time, fwiw. No good way of tracking read messages cross-platform.

You will likely dismiss me as an edge case, but in my experience there’s a LOT of people using Mac laptops, and Windows desktops, who want to be able to use the same apps on both, for instance. (And don’t necessarily want to buy Office *twice*, when a perfectly reasonable subset is available free that includes access to the same documents from multiple computers.)

This has become too long already, but the core of the issue is whether you find browser-based apps to be useful to you or not. If they are not, and you’re happy using purely standalone apps (maybe with a light topping of some kind of networking thrown in as a benny), then there is nothing interesting here.

On a side note, saying, ‘I see no use for this new technology…’ is a sure way to have to eat crow eventually. (And what’s with the hate-on for new Google tools? I think street-view is cool, and already useful in my current road-trip going to NYC!)

Most email readers have an offline mode. My email reader is gmail. I’m very much looking forward to gmail with an offline mode!

GGears helps make the browser a deeper platform, independent of the underlying OS. That’s a good thing.

– Morgan

p.s. I actually am the developer of a sort of ‘hybrid’ desktop/webapp program, so I find it humorous that I’m arguing the other side of things, but I’m definitely excited to see these tools coming out.
http://www.lazycoder.com Scott

“You will likely dismiss me as an edge case, but in my experience there’s a LOT of people using Mac laptops, and Windows desktops,”

HA, if you are then so am I. I use Google Reader primarily for that very reason. (well actually, because Google Reader is a better feed reader than Newsgator online. NNW syncs beautifully with Newsgator online and I used that setup in place of Google Reader for a long time).

I’m actually starting to think differently about Google Gears. I still don’t see a need for taking a web application offline BUT… think about storing data on the client where it can be accessed by either desktop application or a web based application. Say if NNW could access the Google Reader offline store? Or if Zoho or Google Writer stored my documents locally and I had an Office plug in that could load my documents from that local store?

What about storing credit card information on my local hard drive instead of on a merchants server?

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