Offline Applications: A Brighter Future Than You Think
August 29th, 2007 (4:00pm) Samuel Dean 7 Comments
Despite a lot of disagreement about the value of moving web applications offline, I’m starting to believe that there will be a big future for offline apps. Web Worker Daily has hosted some interesting discussions on the topic, with very good input from the readers. One of the common positions that naysayers take is that offline applications will present big problems when it comes to synching with their online incarnations. But, after examining my own usage of offline applications, and watching the progress of Google Gears, I’m convinced that we will see a lot of compelling offline applications.
What’s an example of an offline application? One example would be using GMail offline while sitting on an airplane–drafting and reading messages–and then synching back up when you’re online. When synched, you get your messages that you created sent, and other offline tasks automatically done online. Because the IT department where I work requires us to use Microsoft Outlook, and Outlook has very robust features for working offline and then synching back up online, I already make good use of these features. For a coast-to-coast flight where I won’t have online access, the offline features are absolutely a big convenience.
I’m also encouraged by some of the initiatives I’m seeing from developers for offline applications. Google Gears is attracting more developers for example.
If you’re unfamiliar with Google Gears, it’s still a beta initiative, but as long as you’ve downloaded the main application, you can already run a number of interesting offline applications designed to work with it. For example, there is already a simple offline database application you can use, shown below. This would be useful for tasks such as inputting database entries while offline on a plane, and then automatically synching your entries up with your database when back online.
As another example, there is also a useful little Resource Store demo available, shown below. This does things like capture and store URLs that you want to visit later.
It’s precisely these kinds of simple applications, where all that will be required is efficient synching when back online, that make me think there is a future for offline applications. Of course, Google Gears isn’t the only significant effort in this area. Adobe Air, formerly Apollo, is also of interest, and it will be very interesting to see the offline applications that are slated to arrive in Mozilla Firefox 3. My bet is that offline applications will become widespread. I’d love to hear what others think.
What do you think of offline applications? Are they a bunch of hooey? Do you use any currently?
7 Comments Post your own comment
Brent Hopkins says: August 29th, 2007 5:45pm
well, if you count Gmail, then yes I already use offline apps on my phone. I would sure like to see more… Google Docs would be a natural. Firefox is probably the best bet for a variety of apps from different sources. My primary concern with Firefox is similar to the problem with its many wonderful extensions: code bloat and slow startup times. I really hope they devise a way to load and unload extensions and apps much more quickly. Otherwise they will have to rename it “Fatfox.”
Jason Berlinsky says: August 29th, 2007 9:33pm
I am one such developer for this platform. I recently released software called GearsPress, which is a plugin for WordPress allowing blog owners to take their blogs offline for their users. An example can be found here: http://www.jasonberlinsky.com/view-offline/ and the official site can be found here: http://www.gearspress.com/
Jason
JRB Computer Services
http://www.jrbcomputerservices.com/
Anon says: August 30th, 2007 6:15am
Lotus Notes?
Anon says: August 30th, 2007 8:55am
In a year or two most mobile phones and laptops will have built in satellite, GSM and 3G support as well as WiFi. Many planes, trains and cruise ships now have Internet access and cell transmitters are even being installed in subways. We are getting less and less offline this whole thing seems pretty pointless to me.
Marc Reidy says: August 30th, 2007 1:20pm
My company use Outsite in (www.outsite-in.com) as it provides a full platform (apache/php/mysql) install so that our web apps can run on the client. Currently we just use it for demo’ing our software but it means that we can create a sync client later and not have to rely on writing a brand new client app.
Also whilst I kind of accept the satellite arguement I think that signal strength (and cost) needs a lot of work so we’ll have fat clients for a long time yet.
Rick Treitman says: August 31st, 2007 8:38am
We at Virtual Ubiquity live in the cloud. As the creators of Buzzword, we naturally gravitate to the online case, but certainly find ourselves occasionally disconnected. As we dig further into the business of providing desktop-level functionality delivered online, it becomes more than apparent that one needs an online/offline hybrid to be a truly functional product. As we’ve implemented Buzzword in Flash and are running our preview release in IE, Safari, and Firefox we more than look forward to migrating to Adobe AIR in order to provide the complete answer to web-based apps.
amnon says: November 4th, 2007 2:55pm
If you like this trend you really should check http://jnext.org. I would explain it but just looking at the two small samples in the main page will do do it much better…