Google Starts Making Online Apps Work Offline

By Eric Dahl
Tue, July 24, 2007

PC World — Use enough Web applications, and you'll grow very familiar with one common complaint: Anytime you're offline, you can't get to your data. But a growing number of applications are working to change that.

Zimbra, a popular open-source e-mail application, added an offline version called Zimbra Desktop back in March. Mozilla has announced that Firefox 3 will support caching to allow Web apps to work offline. And Adobe's desktop Ajax application framework called AIR will offer some support for offline data. But as it often does, Google has made the biggest splash so far with the Gears API it announced in May.

Google released Gears along with the first app to make use of it, a new version of Google Reader that allows for offline reading of RSS feeds. Other companies have begun to use the Gears framework, too; the first one I found to have implemented it is the online to-do list tracker Remember the Milk.

Getting into Gears
Both Google Reader and Remember the Milk have taken the same simple approach to offline support. Click the little green arrow icon on the toolbar at the top of either to download and cache the data you'll need to work offline. Once you're synced up, you can unplug your connection and keep working, even if you close and reopen your browser. When you're ready to reconnect, click the blue arrow icon in the same location, and your changes migrate back online.

The Gears-enabled Reader works quite well, though its offline support is a bit rudimentary. Full-text feeds such as Engadget and Techcrunch work best, of course, but even in those I'd like to be able to tell Reader to also sync images in the feeds, and to boost the number of posts it syncs for offline reading. Stranger still, if you're browsing online and you click the offline button, you're unceremoniously dumped back at the top of the feed you're reading, and any feed-based images that you're viewing go away.

Remember the Milk has some similar issues. Delete a task in offline mode, and there is no way to recover it, though you can easily undo that action online.

Most of all, though, going offline with a Gears app requires some planning. Don't expect to just boot up your PC without a connection and start working in Reader. With current Gears apps, you'll want to start with a live connection and switch them all into offline mode before you dump your connection. It would be nice to have the option to sync automatically whenever you're online.

Continue Reading

Everybody's heard the cliché, "the network is your business." But that's not going to help you choose the best wide area networking service to meet your diverse needs
Learn how your answer to this question compares to your peers by taking this quick poll. See how your peers are dealing with the challenge of ensuring a highly capable server infrastructure as technological shifts impact the application server platform.
With increasing data growth, comes increased need for data security.  The existing DLP model, with a focus on compliance/enforcement is not sufficient as the data discovery and classification capabilities are not granular enough.  Read this paper to find how you can efficiently and accurately manage your risk by rapidly inventorying and classifying your data and then developing remediation workflows that support business needs. 
This paper breaks down attack sources into four categories: external, malicious insiders, accidental insiders, and unknown.
The rapid growth of data and technology is creating challenges for organizations as this digital data is considered to be business communications and must be preserved according the same industry-specific regulations governing the retention and discovery of emails and more traditional forms of electronic communications. This paper examines the role that Data Loss Prevention ("DLP") technology can play in helping organizations address the challenges of locating information in response to electronic discovery.
This research, conducted by the Ponemon Institute, focuses on issues relating to the use of data protection solutions such as endpoint encryption and data loss prevention within the workplace.
Too much information can be just as limiting as too little information if users can't get what they want when they want it. Find out how the IT leaders at one of Canada's leading law firms, Fraser Milner Casgrain LLP, implemented Recommind's next-generation content delivery and search platform within their SharePoint portal to enable timely and effortless access to the information users need.
As greater numbers of datacenter servers transition from the physical to the virtual world, the components of virtualization success come to the fore. What scores of organizations have discovered is that success is derived from an optimal pairing of the right software platform with the right hardware platform.
Have you been looking to hear about customer's experiences with the new VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager product? View this webcast to learn about VMware customer, Navicure, and their experiences testing and evaluating the recovery manager, their progress in implementing it in their environment and their advice other customers considering using vCenter.
Many enterprises have discovered that the use of virtualization to support desktop workloads creates a range of significant benefits. These benefits include price efficiencies, improved IT management and greater agility and choice for end users.

This VMware sponsored webcast with IDC will provide both quantitative measurement of the business value -- defined as the expected ROI -- and qualitative analysis associated with the use of VMware View™. IDC will also provide an analysis of the View Composer and ThinApp™ features of VMware View, including the business value of these solutions and an overview of how they work.

Attend this webcast to learn about:
- Challenges and barriers that might impede the adoption of desktop virtualization
- Navigating roadblocks to facilitate a strategic implementation
- Optimizing qualitative and quantitative benefits to IT and your business
VMware recently announced VMware vFabric™ Data Director, a new database deployment and operations platform that enables enterprise IT organizations to offer database as a private cloud service. Built on top of VMware vSphere 5, vFabric Data Director enables IT organizations to ontrol database sprawl through automation and consistent policy enforcement and accelerate application development cycles with self-service database management. Attend this webcast to learn how vFabric Data Director can help you build database-as-a-service in your datacenter.
A simple, cost-effective disaster-recovery solution for virtual environments is high on the agenda for IT organizations as they virtualize more business-critical applications with VMware. VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager-the market-leading disaster-recovery product-ensures the simplest and most reliable disaster protection for all virtualized applications. VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager provides centralized management of recovery plans, enables nondisruptive testing and automates site-failover processes.
Newsletter Sign-Up »

Receive the latest news test, reviews and trends on your favorite technology topics

Choose a newsletter
  1. View all Newsletters | Privacy Policy
Resource Center