Periodic Ramblings

Earlier this week, Google announced that through the use of their Gears technology, Gmail would be added to the list of applications that could be used offline.   You can opt-in to use this feature by clicking on the “Labs” icon at the top of Gmail, scroll down to “Offline” and click enable.

As soon as it is enabled, there will be an “offline” link at the top of your Gmail page.  Clicking on offline will take the user through a quick installation, allowing you to create icons on your system and creates the Gears database necessary to store your mailbox information.  According to the documentation I could find  on the Google site, by default it will download up to 10,000 messages, using some sort of algorithm to determine what 10,000 should be downloaded.  I would imagine this is based on thread counts and frequency of receiving a message from that contact.

To facilitate the creation of email, Google has now enabled and outbox in Gmail.  The email will be  stored here until it is back online, at which time it will send the mail out.  There is even a “flaky connection” mode for times when you are on a less than reliable network connection.  This will force Gmail to operate in offline mode, performing the synchronization in the background for sending and receiving mail. 

Gears is allowing Google to blend the line between web browser/Internet and the desktop.  I currently use the offline mode for Google Reader, Google Documents and Remember the Milk.  This allows me to use the power of cloud technology but still have access to my data when I am offline, without having to worry about creating a synchronization technology.  Gears holds a lot of possibilities.