Using Gmail, Calendar and Docs without an Internet connection

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/08/using-gmail-calendar-and-docs-without.html

by antr • 15 years ago

141 70 15 years ago

gmailblog.blogspot.com

csulok• 15 years ago

offline gmail is disappointing. it's basically the tablet version, meaning the consistent google interface is lost, labs features are lost, keyboard shortcuts are lost, theming options are lost, google nav bar is gone, etc...

offline docs and offline calendar is not available but from the description, it sounds they have proper implementations.

danberger• 15 years ago

I agree. Furthermore, offline google apps don't work if you use multiple sign-in

ditojim3• 15 years ago

multi-sign in is supported for offline gmail.

mvelie• 15 years ago

The tablet version is horrible on the desktop, I don't understand why the interface had to change just to cache the email messages.

MatthewPhillips6• 15 years ago

What a massive failure. I wonder if they realized they weren't going to hit the deadline so they decided to do a quick implementation with the tablet app. The old rumors that Gmail is a massive spaghetti mess must be true. Let's just hope they're actively rewriting it and don't think this is good enough.

niels_olson2• 15 years ago

Fun fact, you're the only person here with karma over 100 (2210 when I checked). Your criticism therefore is not only brutal but reputable.

There are googlers here on HN, and they are trying to make right by offline access (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2627365).

Since you develop for the Chrome app store, did that particular comment advance your cause? Are there particulars you could point them toward, or identify things they should keep in the total re-write you hope for?

corin_• 15 years ago

A few thousand really isn't much in HN's scale of users, it shows you aren't completely new, nothing more.

MatthewPhillips6• 15 years ago

I don't hope for or care for a total re-write; that's up to them. But they should be able to cache all resources with AppCache. They should be able to cache recent messages with LocalStorage. These are not new technologies; they've been around for a couple of years at least. Here's Google discussing their use of AppCache in Mobile Gmail well over 2 years ago.[1]

[1] http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-html...

rachelbythebay• 15 years ago

It's still August. Stuff doesn't get rushed out until the end of a quarter when OKRs are looming. At that point you can push any old thing and get away with it.

In other words, check back in a month to see even worse.

Lewisham• 15 years ago

Gmail is probably Google's biggest product after search. It's also been around for a long time, so you do have to keep that in mind.

I would presume the Gmail team are still working on offline, but Google prefers launch + iterate, rather than waiting for things to reach a "finished" state. This was the quickest way to get people to an offline Gmail product.

DISCLAIMER: I'm an intern at Google, but have no information about these products apart from what is publicly known.

dannyr2• 15 years ago

Maybe they just want a solution that people can use RIGHT NOW. What's wrong with that?

I'm thankful for Google providing this solution though I'm hoping for a better one in the future.

Calling it a massive failure is just mean-spirited.

You call yourself an "aspiring entrepreneur" but I don't think you understand what it means to be one and actually build stuff. If you do, you wouldn't be making comments like that.

MatthewPhillips6• 15 years ago

I'm a programmer and I've received much harsher words about stuff I've written. Maybe I'm hypocritical, but I feel less of a need to bite my tongue with Google than with a HNer's weekend project. The fact is that they've been promising this feature since they discontinued Gears over a year and a half ago and to then fail in this way is both disappointing and insulting to me. It's insulting because I'm passionate about the web and I know that web applications can handle offline just as well as native applications, and their slowness to add support to their most important products contradicts that belief. And it's insulting because they've released something so that they can say they have Offline Gmail when this barely counts as that. Having separate apps, with separate UIs, and separate ways of launching, for an online and an offline version is not a customer-centric decision; it's a face-saving PR decision.

nex37• 15 years ago

(Offline Gmail team member here)

One thing we learned early on was that making any existing system (especially one as big as Gmail) work offline had some very difficult, fundamental issues. The biggest of these is that everything that normally happens server-side must also be able to happen client-side when there's no network connection.

This is a problem not only because there is a lot of server-side complexity in Gmail, but also because it changes all the time. New features are added, old behavior is changed, and if the offline code path isn't changed along with it, things have a tendency to break horribly. The only solutions to this involve having every Gmail engineer modify the offline code path whenever they touch the online, which is a large burden that we weren't willing to lay on them.

MatthewPhillips6• 15 years ago

Thanks for your response. I take this to mean that Gmail is undergoing a complete re-write. Is that correct?

blub2• 15 years ago

I think the difficulty is that none of the technologies that you are using were designed for building software applications, but for showing text and images on a screen.

In other words, there is a perfectly fine solution for offline G-mail, it's called "e-mail client".

anigbrowl• 15 years ago

As a tablet user, I actually like this; when I got a honeycomb tablet, I realized I had come to miss the split-screen view after several years of using Gmail...not that I want it to turn in gOutlook, but there are definite advantages.

On the negative side, it's very weak that there are no formatting controls in this version. I miss them on the tablet side already, which means that messages sent from that device necessarily have a different signature from those sent from my desktop. It's not necessary or even desirable for mail recipients to know I was using one device or another. Some people like to signal that they are on the go with 'sent from my phone' or the like, but I would rather have some basic editing functionality, and this would not be hard to add. On a tablet it's annoying, on the desktop or a laptop where I might need to work offline it's unforgivable. On the up side, this is a good starting point for building an editing/configuration interface that could find its way back towards the tablet space. With wide-format screens the norm nowadays, I was struck by how much more pleasant the panel experience was on my desktop monitor and could see myself switching to this from the page+widgets approach of existing gMail, which is beginning to feel very long in the tooth.

This goes double for Google Docs, although it's slightly off-topic. I like working on my tablet a great deal and find I can type surprisingly fast even with the on-screen keyboard as opposed to an external one. But Google Docs on a tablet is so unusable that every manufacturer ships with some open-source office suite to make up for the deficiency. since Android does not have the same mind/market share as iOS/iPad, Google needs to offer compelling software alternatives. In many respects it already does so; but productivity tools are noticeable by their absence or abridgement. A minimally-capable version of Google Docs made sense on a smartphone, but on a full-size tablet it's absurdly self-defeating, and inimical to a corporate or academic environment. I would pay for a 'power user' tablet version of core apps like gMail and gDocs. The fact that there is no easy way to leverage forms into an Android clipboard/data-entry interface is a major missed opportunity.

This really needs to see some movement in tandem with the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich launch. I know both Docs and Android are outside of your remit, but hope you could circulate these concerns in the cafeteria, so to speak. I mention this here because *@gmail.com is increasingly acceptable as a professional address, but this will only last so long as the tools cater to the needs of professionals.

temphn• 15 years ago

This comment is completely out of line. Trashing something pretty decent on its launch day is not a sign of elevated or discerning taste, it's a sign of someone who does not understand how hard it is to ship something.

Having some kind of offline Gmail (and Docs and Calendar!) is indeed a VERY big win, even if it doesn't have every conceivable feature on day one. It makes Chromebooks that much more appealing.

Ok, the UI and launcher are different. That's not "massive failure", that's minimum viable product. Yeah, even Google does that.

zura• 15 years ago

Maybe they will finally add offline mode to Chrome... http://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+offline+mode

aninteger• 15 years ago

Does anyone else remember QWK mail packets? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_%28file_format%29

I wonder if someone could take the idea of QWK and build it into modern web forums / email systems.

mhd• 15 years ago

I think the file format itself is the most trivial aspect of this whole thing. Even if you'd roll your own, you probably could cobble together some kind of XML/JSON based copy of the message DB diff within hours (or just use RSS).

1880• 15 years ago

While being deprecated and non-standard, the Google Gears version of offline Gmail was much better than this.

cyber• 15 years ago

Limited to Chrome, this is still non-standard.

nex37• 15 years ago

(Offline Gmail team member here)

The primary reason this is Chrome-only is because other browsers don't yet have complete implementations of relevant specs (for example the FileSystem API: http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/pub/FileSystem/). I can't make any promises on the team's behalf, but I personally would like to see it working on Firefox as well at some point.

riffraff• 15 years ago

hear hear! Also, wasn't it supposed to be ported to websql (or since that dies, to IndexedDB)?

marcin4• 15 years ago

Gmail is clearly more of a beta than a functional product (namely attachements don't seem to work), but the biggest question/implication of this change I see is evaporation of any business model (as in 'the ads are gone').

Besides that - I like the UI a lot, but for any offline access to make sens it has to be rock solid (which this obviously isn't).

antr• 15 years ago

in an offline mode how would you monetise offline ad clicks? google's business model is based on ctr not cpm. are you thinking of caching ads/pages too?

marcin4• 15 years ago

Deck is doing that somehow (caching ad impressions at least) - so it is an addressable issue. However - this app works both in online and offline mode, so my point was not really touching the offline ad problem - thanks for pointing it out.

stuartmemo• 15 years ago

I don't imagine they need to monetise this part. The offline app simply makes Gmail even better and gives those who use desktop clients one less reason to stick with them. As a result of this more people will end up using the normal online app and therefore clicking more ads.

nex37• 15 years ago

(Offline Gmail team member here)

Attachments should work, with a few caveats. Due to some annoying quirks of the HTML5 FileSystem API, there's a whitelist of supported file extensions. This includes everything useful we could think of, but it's not exhaustive.

RyanKearney• 15 years ago

Are screensavers considered useful?

cabalamat• 15 years ago

> I like the UI a lot

My experience was the opposite, unfortunately. Why can't the offline gmail application use the same UI as the online one? To me, that would be the obvious way of doing it.

naner2• 15 years ago

the biggest question/implication of this change I see is evaporation of any business model (as in 'the ads are gone').

You can use Gmail with AdBlock or through a POP or IMAP client, too. I think Google will survive.

marcin4• 15 years ago

Adblock? Please. POP / IMAP - valid points. But this is slightly different - it's a product they designed from scratch, control the UX etc. Still - no business model.

ditojim3• 15 years ago

after installing the app off the web store, this works in the background, all the time. that's cool.

casemorton• 15 years ago

I'm confused. Is there a reason why I'm supposed to be excited for this? It just looks like a waste of battery life to me.

voxmatt• 15 years ago

I think Google needs to refocus on the real problem: not having internet access. [joking, but seriously...]

davorak• 15 years ago

I think they do take it seriously.

pointyhat4• 15 years ago

At the risk of sounding like a troll, which I'm genuinely not trying to be, this problem is more than solved when using Outlook with hosted Exchange or Office 365.

That works absolutely perfectly over unreliable connections and in offline mode.

It's also been around for nigh on 10-15 years now.

tommi2• 15 years ago

Outlook with hosted Exchange or Office 365 is a solution which suits some people. However, there are many for whom the Gmail, Calendar and Docs combo works better. Consider money, sharing and other factors and you'll see why the "been around for nigh on 10-15 years" doesn't mean much.

pointyhat4• 15 years ago

Money - if you know what you are doing, you get the partner action pack which costs me 259 GBP a year (22GBP/month) and gives me 10 seats of a lot of cheap software including Windows 7 Pro and Office 2010 Professional [1]. Office 365 is 4 GBP per month per user which costs me less than my monthly toilet roll bill.

Sharing - that's the point of exchange and outlook. It works and it supports all the relevant modern interoperability.

Other factors - ?

[1] https://partner.microsoft.com/40112699

ditojim3• 15 years ago

the difference is this in browser vs. being an installed application. it is web apps catching up to native apps.

pointyhat4• 15 years ago

I think the gap will never close myself. I think it will hypothetically close and then thanks to net neutrality falling over and providers grabbing cash over bandwidth, we're going back to a thick client model.

It all goes in a big cycle which I've seen 2-3 times now in my life.

micampe• 15 years ago

I don't understand why this is a Chrome app instead of a link.

bzbarsky• 15 years ago

Because it uses proprietary stuff that other browsers don't implement and that will never be standardized, for one thing....

Using Gmail, Calendar and Docs without an Internet connection

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