My problem with Google Gears
Was just reading that Google’s readying an offline version of Google Mail. After an initial celebration, I calmed down and read that it was based off of Google Gears and that kinda put a damper on the whole thing.
This will, presumably, work like it does with Google Reader and therein lies the problem - you have to take it on and offline. That is, it’s status is offline when you tell it that it is - it isn’t in a perpetual state of readiness for being offline. So let’s say you’re travelling, if you happen to forget to open the laptop while you have connectivity and take your apps offline, when you get on the plane, you got nothing. This becomes more of an issue as things move to smartphones - you’re in and out of connectivity all the time, I don’t want to have to open up the browser and take something offline everytime I’m about to go down into a subway station. Conversely, I don’t want to have to remember to take it back online (and sync anything that I’ve done) when I get back on the net.
I’m not sure there’s a workaround for this - I mean, if there was some trigger event, presumably one could write something that would take you into offline mode, but what would that trigger be? Losing connectivity?
So, the app that I want is a true offline mode that isn’t browser based but that syncs with Google Reader. In my head, sort of like GMail, this is generically a service that provides RSS feeds over IMAP and rss readers then learn how to send back IMAP flags. How awesome would that be? But even an offline reader that regularly pulled down data from Google Reader (screen scrape style, even) and then sync’d back read and starred flags would be my holy grail.
As for mail.. I don’t really need GMail offline, since I already use IMAP (I just forward mail to Google for backup and searching). If Google offered IMAP (it’s crazy ridiculous that they only offer POP) you wouldn’t need GMail offline since you could use any other client and all your data would remain the same between gmail and your offline client. But noooo, Google wants to make you use Google all the time. Sigh.
