by Gaz
Google Gears
4:40 pm in Programming, Technology by Gaz
In case you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, Google Gears is creating a wave of excitement across the intertubes. It’s a new open source beta browser plugin for Firefox and IE (Safari and Opera to follow) that provides javascript APIs to allow disconnected use of web applications. Once a webapp has integrated with Gears, it will be able to store state on the browser host for offline working, and then quietly resynchronise in the background once the network connection comes back up later.
The first webapp to use it is Google Reader. Once you have Gears installed, Reader will gain a button that downloads a copy of the last couple of thousand articles to your disk, which will allow you to read, tag and share those articles without a net connection, and then resynchronise itself later, when the network is back, with another click. More details at Google’s Gears site.
So, first of all, I want to join in with the masses and proclaim that all of this is a Good Thing, and a welcome step towards reducing our dependency on an always-on internet connection. Traveling from hotel to hotel, and relying on a patchy connection can be frustrating, and if the webapps I rely on start to use Gears, it will certainly make life a little easier for me :-)
But, it’s not a complete solution. Google avoid talking about what happens if I’m using multiple computers. Synchronisation is a hard problem, and I’d be (pleasantly) surprised if things continue to work properly if I disconnect my laptop’s network and work offline with Reader for a while, then while I’m on the train to a meeting I use my mobile phone to read some other feeds… what happens when I reconnect my laptop? What happens if I have a work laptop and a home laptop, and use them both offline sometimes?
For me, having offline access to Google Calendar might be enough to make me switch from Apple’s iCal. iCal is not without its problems: unless I have my laptop with me to change or add appointments, events in my iPod are read-only, and changing or adding events with my phone is painful; .Mac iCal synchronisation always seems to come up with spurious conflicts; and the .Mac web view of my public calendars is read only. If there were a user friendly means of keeping my online, offline and phone calendars nicely synchronised, I’d buy it in a snap!
No doubt everyone is waiting for a Gears version of GMail, and although it will almost certainly arrive if Gears gains the traction it deserves, I still won’t be switching to GMail as my main mail hub. Before I will be comfortable with that, I want to be able to use PGP with my email: I routinely sign every email I send, and I’d like the option to encrypt sensitive business communications when everything is stored (apparently forever!) on Google’s server. There is still no direct IMAP access to GMail, but in order to use PGP with my Google mail, I need to use an external mail client. And Google only let me do that through the venerable POP protocol, so I effectively need to mirror all the email stored at Google to a central IMAP server and jump through some other hoops to sychronise sent mail — and that means that the GMail webapp won’t reflect what’s going on at my IMAP mirrored google mail archive.
However (and this is the good part), the implementation of Gears shows how a javascript API can be produced to interact with client side software; I’ll bet that it isn’t too long before someone else comes up with a PGP GMail plugin to handle email signatures and encryption. In combination with a Gears based GMail and GCal, and some means to make a backup of everything stored there, Google will certainly replace Apple Mail and iCal in my workflow.
We live in interesting times!
As a tech type (!) do you have any knowledge about the rumours of Google supporting a desktop Linux O/S. Googbuntu has been suggested (what a word!) but Glinux sounds better to me. I love the idea of open source but I’ve had no joy with Linux distros so far.
Thanks.
Pete
Hi Pete,
I’ve also heard the rumors about a google desktop that works inside a browser, but I probably don’t know any more than you. Personally, I don’t think a browser based desktop is likely to completely displace the traditional OS based desktop… but, the convenience of having an always available online desktop along with some browser based applications to manipulate the files on it is impossible to ignore. Even Microsoft have been flirting with (subscription based!) web applications for quite a few years now.
With respect to your bad luck with Linux, why not give Mac OS X a spin? Despite complaints of the expense of hardware to run it on, I don’t think an equal specification PC based machine from Dell or the like will come in any cheaper. Plus, you’ll have a machine capable of running Windows and Linux equally well in the unlikely event that you don’t get on with Mac OS.
Cheers, Gary
The synchronization issue is much less of a problem for the Reader than about anything else. Once you read a feed item it marks it as read. Most of the features that would be difficult to sync aren’t available offline.
Gmail presents a much bigger challenge in my opinion, but if they keep it really simple, they may be able to pull it off.
Yes, Reader is certainly the low hanging fruit. But by not doing a great job of a Gears enhanced GMail, google would shoot themselves in the foot, by providing an Open Source infrastructure for disconnected webapp operation on the one hand, and then ignoring the Google application we’re all praying for. Someone else will surely tweak Gears, and some OpenSync-a-like faerie dust, and pull the rug out from under GMail with their own offline capable webmail…
For sure it’s a really hard problem, but the guys at Google are tech-smart and business-smart, so I’d be surprised if they don’t have an alpha quality GMail/Gears integration in their labs already! I can hardly wait :-D