Gmail goes offline with Google Gears | Hacker News Reader

Gmail goes offline with Google Gears

gmailblog.blogspot.com

110 pointswastedbrains50 comments

This is undoubtedly great work from a technical standpoint, but I see the real value here for other types of web apps. Since gmail already supports imap, you could've been managing your mail from a number of free mail clients offline. Just like how Google Maps touched off the ajax craze, this may be more about ushering in a new archetype of offline apps beyond email.

The problem with managing your email from other clients, at least to me, is that other email clients have workflows that don't work with my expectations. I'm so used to using the Gmail key bindings that I find working in Apple Mail or Thunderbird slow and painful. The lack of a native Archive metaphor in those clients causes me further pain. I funnel almost all of my email into Gmail and gave up on local email clients some time ago. The only way I would revert is if I could have a local app that approximated the Gmail workflow. Offline Gmail is a welcome addition.

My sentiment exactly. What I would really want is a good email client, like Thunderbird but with Gmail workflow - so at least it will support grouping emails by conversation ( but not the way TB does it). I wonder why no one implemented that yet.

Gears is great. "Flaky connection mode" is even better.

I've been waiting for this feature for a really long time.

Reminds me of 2005 when I was waiting for them to come out with Calendar and waiting for someone to come out with easy video publishing. Was so happy to see these products get made.

The fact that Google controls all my data makes me less happy.

Rather them than any other company in my opinion.

Than any other single company.

It makes me _more_ happy :-)

Rather them than me.

This must have been a real pain to implement; rumors of this have been floating around for years now.

Reader has had Gears for many moons now.

Well to release gears to a application like reader or docs is easy cause your userbase is small. Gmail is a HUGE product with thousands of users and to even release something like that to labs you need complete protection of not only the data but also security for your DBs.

Reader and Docs were simply there to ensure the safety, if they went down due to security issues not that many people would be concerned.

Also, I think with Gmail its a bit harder to decide how much to store on your local drive. I believe Reader just stores your unread stuff, but with email you often want to search or reference old messages, so its a substantially more complicated thing to deal with UI-wise.

I just tried that with Reader. I have no unread items but gears wanted to download 2000 items and it took a while.

Then, I switched back to online mode, works as you expect.

Switched back to offline mode, and it wants to download 2000 items again.

I decided offline mode for reader wasn't very good.

Google's audience for reader and docs are in the millions and could hardly be described as "small", just like Gmail has a lot more than "thousands" of users :)

You understood my point :) But gmail vastly outnumbers docs and reader in both security and scale.

Thousands of emails and contacts with personal information. Docs and Reader doesn't need to store the contacts or emails of the user. Docs stores data and reader stores stores.

You can understand the security complications.

While I agree with you about Reader, I doubt the security implications for Gmail are much more severe than for Docs, because so many businesses are using Docs through Google Apps, and you know they're storing sensitive info on there. One breach and it's over.

Well I doubt the enterprise service is available with ofline quite yet.

Google gmail goes off line with google gears (official google blog entry)

  s/gmail/Gmail
  s/off line/offline
  s/gears/Gears
  s/google/Google/g

Any chance we can do away with this kind of nit-picking now? I'd hate for it to get out of hand like it is at "that other site".

Besides it's rather pretentious & I only tolerate that from myself.

If you're going to nitpick over something, nitpick over the link being to the front page of the blog, not to the blog post.

(Maybe by the time people reading this tomorrow follow the link, Google will have posted something else.)

One error is a nit, but five in one article title? That's just sloppy. Proper punctuation, capitalization, and spelling are de rigueur here at Hacker News, and as one of its more wizened denizens I was doing my part to enforce the local culture. (It was also an implicit message to the editors to fix it---which they did.)

N.B. This is a record number of downmods for me (five as of this writing), and I find it alarming how something so trivial can do so much to distress my fragile primate brain.

I think a lot of hair-trigger downvoters have arrived in the past few weeks. (Or maybe old hands have just gotten grumpy.)

I've noticed quality comments being pushed initially down to 0 or -1 simply because they have a strong viewpoint with which some people would disagree.

It's unavoidable that one-dimensional moderation votes will often be used for expressing disagreement. OK. Still, comments should only be pushed below 1 -- faded out as if they were a punishable offense -- if they're bad for the discussion.

I'm sorry, but it isn't "de rigueur" here to play grammar and spelling nazi to headlines. Yes, people who post while abiding by the standard rules of English are generally better regarded here than people who do not.

If you really feel you must point out the failings of someone's grammar or capitalization, then perhaps you should find another avenue to point it out than overplayed vim-isms.

Palish has set a good example if you must: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=436458

Using compact s/// notation to recommend changes isn't 'nazi', it's hacker.

It's the reader's choice to interpret it as brusque rather than just efficient. Choose well!

Ordinarily, I'm careful about how I give feedback, especially in sensitive situations. This didn't seem like one of those times, so I opted for brevity instead of subtlety.

Given the reaction, it appears that I misjudged. Your comments are particularly notable; you are also one of the more experienced inhabitants of these parts, and I take your feedback seriously. There are aspects of the tone that give me pause (the parent comment strikes me as somewhat supercilious), but the content is much appreciated, and I'll be more circumspect in the future.

And get your nickpick right! It should be "s/gmail/Gmail/" with a trailing slash.

You need the trailing slash when using sed at the command line, but it's optional when doing a replacement in vi(m). You're right, though; the version with the trailing slash is probably the canonical form.

This is a good comment: its suggestions were accepted; it improves the look of the top story on the front page.

But ideally it would disappear from view as soon as it is addressed, and even before being addressed, it shouldn't interfere with other on-topic conversation.

I would like it if articles had a separate 'meta' thread for comments like this. Or, for comments to have an extra 'transient meta' flag that lets them be deleted indefinitely in the future, once they're addressed or otherwise moot.

Only people who choose to view meta -- or those with the power to change the target, like the original author or admins -- would then need to see these comments.

Sorry. I typed it all out quickly, I kind of in a rush to get back to some coding.

I also called it 'Google Gears' and not it is only called 'Gears'

I am not really one to follow or believe in grammar for a simple link though, but I will say that many errors in a single line might be a bit over the top.

This solves my biggest problem with managing my GOogle account over iMap. When I tried to set it up with Apple Mail I ran into the issue of each label being treated as a folder. This meant that for each label a duplicate of the message was created meaning that I could have up to 4 different copies of any single email.

I had a very similar problem with Thunderbird. I couldn't find my mail half of the time. I gave up in the end and now just access the web interface.

Am I the only person who doesn't have this as an option?

I've had other Labs features for awhile, but I did a find of the Labs page for "offline", and even manually looked through the page, and found nothing!

I have gears installed even.

It should be available to everyone this week; I don't have it either.

I didn't know until today that Google Gears is available for Safari. I don't know why but I always assumed it was IE + FF only.

I've been waiting for this for what seems line eons.

I wonder why Google isn't offering a DOM Storage implementation of this. Versions of Firefox 2 and later offer built-in support for WHATWG's DOM Storage API, which would (theoretically) allow users to have this functionality without installing the Gears extension.

My best guess is that Gears is more robust and probably easier to implement things with than DOM Storage, but I'd appreciate if anyone with experience using both could confirm this.

While I agree with the coolness quotient, and the technological marvel, here is one for the skeptics:

I, being an infrequent traveller, am almost always online - whenever I am using my laptop, that is. In the age of always-online-everywhere, how many people really find this useful?

You may be online everywhere you go, but believe me, wi-fi is not everywhere yet, and often where it is, it's slow and/or broken.

I, for one, welcome our new offline e-mail overlords. :-)

Now all it needs is a "Combine conversations" button. hint hint

Great feature though, I'm sure this will get more people to install Gears and ensure it's not a "lost cause" for Google. I'm sure Gears is a big part of their strategy for the web now.

I'd be interested to see a list of non-Google products using it. I've seen lots of presentations on Gears from people like Dion and it looks great but I guess I felt like it would take off more and I don't feel like I've seen that yet.

Why don't they charge for this?

Because the more Gmail competes with regular mail clients and offers the same features, the more likely users use Gmail. More users of Gmail, means more data and targeted ads.

Once you charge, you have to deliver some level of customer service. If it's a free service, you can fall back on mea culpa blog posts and the 'beta' tag.

That being said, Eudora made a mint with its Pro version for many years.

Will it be getting autosync?

It always bothered me that I had to wait for Google Reader + Gears to download before I left the house.

How about authentication?

Jeez, finally. Took them long enough to combine two products in an incredibly obvious way.

About time!

Amazing! If only Knuth could appreciate this progress in computer science and software engineering! May be in volume 7 he can write about Web Browsers, DOM and AJAX… he can even drop its MMIX and rewrote all his books using Javascript, the real assembler of the Web!

That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

Knuth doesn't write about a particular programming language for one and what relevance does it have to this story here? What Knuth has written is relevant to programming in general. He has reasons for using MMIX http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/mmix.html. Really you should try reading at least a few chapters from his book.

It's called irony.

Everybody is talking about an offline version of gmail, as if such thing is a progress... I had being using offline mailers from the old Internet times.

And about reading a few chapters from his book... don't make me cry, my life was spent on computer science research and I don't need to show any "credential" to you.

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