Jeffrey Donenfeld

Tag: Google Gears

  • At Long Last – The Return of Offline Gmail

    At Long Last – The Return of Offline Gmail

    I love using Google Apps for my Calendar, Documents, and especially email. For Gmail, the interface is great, fast with keyboard shortcuts, and since it’s all online, it’s available everywhere and doesn’t tax my local system. And up until recently, for those times when I’m offline, I could still access my Gmail offline using Google Gears. Googles Gears was a browser plugin that enabled offline storage – allowing me to download all of my email into Gmail before getting on a flight, and then going through it offline, and syncing when I landed and got my connection back. However a few months ago Google dropped support for Gears, since the new HTML5 standard natively supports offline storage. However, they have yet to actually update the Gmail, or other Google Apps to use this feature of HTML5 – leaving users with no way of accessing offline Gmail anymore.

    And now, finally, there’s an end in sight for this offline email dryspell. Google has announced at Google I/O conference that it will be updating Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Docs sometime this summer to use the offline storage features in HTML5, thus bringing back offline Gmail. Whew!

    It’s been a long time coming, but this is definitely a step in the right direction, and as the Tech Crunch article mentions, helps Google position their Chrome OS and ChromeBooks as viable options for normal people – IE people who don’t always always have an internet connection. I’ll be eagerly awaiting the release…

    Listening to: Black Sabbath – Junior’s Eyes (Hype Machine Link) WOW! This track has some serious dynamic range! Sounds amazing!!!

  • WordPress Updates to 2.6

    WordPress.org just released, ahead of schedule, the 2.6 version of WordPress – the backend that runs this blog. Some of the new features are much appreciated – live preview of themes, wordcount, post revision history, and a more robust image control box.

    I just did the upgrade, which went smoothly, for the most part. The only hitch I encountered was re-activating plugins. After re-activation, the whole admin backend crashed and started giving code errors. To fix it, I had to re-name the plugins folder (thereby deactivating all), and go through one by one and re-activate plugins, and upgrade them to the latest version.

    One of the coolest features in 2.6 is the new usage of Google Gears. Gears is an add on for IE and Firefox, which lets wordpress store core files locally on the computer, instead of needing to load them up from the web for every page. This significantly increases interface responsiveness, especially for new AJAX’y features.

    I’m glad to see that Google Gears is starting to gain a little bit more traction. Before this, my only regular usage of gears was with Google Reader, which will let you cache rss feeds for offline viewing. I always use this feature, especially when flying – hop on the web in the airport terminal before I board my flight, sync up with the latest news in reader, piece through it all on the plane, and re-sync when I land.

  • IM First Steps for Mobile Web-Apps

    IM First Steps for Mobile Web-Apps

    Instant Messaging while on the go – It’s increasingly more essential, yet with many current software/hardware offerings, increasingly more frustrating. 

    I carry a Blackberry Curve 8300, which has its strengths and weaknesses. The hardware is actually decent, well built, good screen etc. The software, however, is absolutely worthless. It honestly feels like a 1st try beta version. There are random menu items where they’re not needed (example: “call voice mail” option in the camera options menu – why?!?!), and the UI is so un-optimized that despite reasonably powerful hardware, the thing still crawls doing the most basic tasks. One of those basic tasks, which you’d think the curve would be able to do easily is instant messaging. The Blackberry Messenger does work well, but not everybody has a Blackberry – probably for the better. I use AIM and gChat mostly. While there are decent clients for both of these networks, when running either one of them, it causes the rest of the phone to grind to a halt – text takes 5 seconds to come up after you’ve typed it, and it takes till the 4th ring for the os to catch up and allow you to actually take a call. Amazing how they could actually sell a product like this.

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