Comments on: Google platform getting offline support?

By: Ian Murdock

Ian Murdock — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 14:12:33 +0000

Good point about Google Desktop---that example hadn't occurred to me. Thinking more about it, the controversial Search Across Computers feature is synchronization to a certain extent, though it's obviously not two-way and not fully integrated with the rest of the platform (search results don't come up when you search from a computer that isn't running Google Desktop when logged in to your Google account). Still, it's interesting that there's some precedent here. -ian

By: Garett Rogers

Garett Rogers — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 13:56:38 +0000

I’ve heard the argument about “left over dev code” before — but Google has been known to use the “local web server” method for some of their other products too, namely Google Desktop.

If you click on “desktop” while at Google’s homepage, you will see it takes you to http://127.0.0.1:4664 or http://localhost:4664

Not only is the code in there, it’s the next logical step for the product — that combination gets my attention 100% of the time.

By: Ian Murdock

Ian Murdock — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 13:28:17 +0000

Yeah, you could imagine running a (presumably trimmed down) version of the same code base that’s running in the cloud on the local machine. Then the problem of offline support reduces to synchronizing the underlying data store (which is a difficult but at least familiar problem, as opposed to the browser based solutions, which are new territory). Maybe S3 just needs to support disconnected operation a la Coda, and everything just works? As regards the permission settings, I’ve never seen a warning, at least in Firefox (never been a big IE user :-). -ian

By: Cote'

Cote' — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 12:55:18 +0000

Whoa! That is neat…even if it’s just left over dev code. I think you’re spot on about using localhost for desktop “services.” It’s so pragmatic! I hadn’t thought of that, and now it’s got my mind all excited before my first cup of coffee.

Do the permission settings in IE and Firefox allow that without going bonkers? You’d hope so, right?

By: Ian Murdock

Ian Murdock — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 21:18:38 +0000

Good point, but Garett has posted a fair number of code snippets that have indeed ended up foreshadowing coming features. So, I'm hopeful! And you're right, in the absence of a localhost Gmail, there's a lot Google could do (IMAP, for one thing). I've thought about using libgmail to write a Gmail synchronizer, but like so many things, I haven't found the time to actually do it. -ian

By: christophe

christophe — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 21:00:47 +0000

This could be some left over dev code. They certainly have a local copy of gmail running on their machine to test their code.

I wish they were working on offline support but I don’t really believe it will be available anytime soon.

Concerning gmail, adding the tags in the email header (X-gamil-tag: …,…) when fetched from their pop server would be really great. It is easy to have an offline copy of your emails but without these tags, you need to sort them again. It’s a nogo for me as I don’t want to do it twice and I want an organized copy of my emails locally.
Speaking of tags, it would be great to have a thunderbird with the tags features (including propagation to the threads).