Web Worker Daily

As web workers, we are often asked to help friends and relatives fix computer problems. For me, the majority of these problems seem to be related to email. It’s ironic, as email is now less popular than social networks.

So why is email such a hassle?

• It’s more than 30 years old. Email has come a long way, but its underlying protocols haven’t changed much since the 1970s.
• It’s really three different systems. Sending (SMTP) and receiving (POP or IMAP) are totally separate functions, and are often handled on different servers. That’s why I often hear comments like “I can receive, but I can’t send” from clients.
• It’s being used for a lot of things it was never designed to do, like send images and attachments, highly formatted messages, signatures and calendar entries.
• It’s been overrun by spam, and even well-designed spam filters aren’t perfect, and cause unwanted side effects, like messages that get misidentified as spam, or just go away.
• Email software is too complex. These programs that were originally built for offline use; that is, they were set up so that users could read and write messages without being connected to the internet. Sending and receiving would happen in batches. That made sense when internet connections were slow, expensive and charged by the minute. Now that most people have always-on connections like cable or DSL, that process is less necessary. Desktop email client software is a pain to set up and use; as someone who helps many people with email, Outlook is the bane of my existence.
• Many of us connect to the Internet in more than one place — at work, at home, and on cell phones. It can be very frustrating to realize that we’ve left the message we needed to reply to at the office.
• Many of us have more than one email address. I try to keep my work and personal email separate, plus I have a series of email addresses that I use when registering on websites that might try to send spam. And I have several email addresses that were given to me, such as the ones that are automatically created when signing up for instant-messaging services like Yahoo, AIM and Windows Live/MSN.

What can be done to overcome these problems? Here are some tips that might help you and your clients and friends be more productive. Read the rest of this entry »

As Google deepened its support for offline access via IMAP this week, Zoho, its closest competitor in the web office space, was publicly unveiling its own support for offline and access, ironically using Google’s own Gears platform.

Curiously Zoho decided that to bring users’ mailboxes offline, Gears was a better technological platform for offline access than the IMAP protocol; though we’re assured IMAP is coming.

Regardless, the offline features seem pretty comprehensive despite currently being restricted to Gears for Firefox and Internet Explorer and with most online features being available offline – messages, images & attachments are optionally available and a clever connectivity detection feature automatically determines whether a network is visible, flipping between offline and online modes as appropriate, with offline messages queued for later deliver when connectivity becomes available.

A Gears configuration dialog allows users to select the number of messages to download initially, how many Sent Items should be stored for offline access.

Finally, though Zoho is pitching mobile access alongside offline support, in reality Zoho Mail is currently only optimised for the iPhone.

Though the offline support appears to work well enough – as do other Gears-enabled services such as Google Reader – mainstream offline access seems a little too fragmented for comfort.

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According to a post on the Google Docs Blog, Google Gears, a Firefox extension that enables users to create and edit files without an Internet connection, will bless Google Docs with offline access in the coming weeks. The rollout will begin today with a small number of users.

At first launch, word processing documents can be read and edited in offline mode, while spreadsheets will only be able to be read (but not edited). Support for Google Presentations is in the pipeline and will not be initially available. Naturally, collaboration on documents that have been created offline will not be available until the new document has been synced when the user comes back online. On a related note, it is currently unclear how smooth reconciliation of offline documents will be.

Google Documents has been in dire need of offline access in order to realistically compete other office suites including Microsoft Office and Zoho. Users of office productivity suites don’t always has connectivity to the Internet.

Currently, the only Google product to use Google Gears is Google Reader allowing for offline access to RSS news items. Google is not first in offering offline access of productivity apps through Google Gears, having been beaten to market by Zoho and Remember The Milk.

Google Gears for Google Docs will require Internet Explorer 6 and above or FireFox 1.6 and above (not including Firefox Beta 3) on Windows, Mac, and Linux. There is currently no support for other browsers including Safari, Flock, Opera, or the various mobile browsers.

Those of us who rely on hosted (the current buzz word is “in the cloud“) data and software solutions, connectivity is a must.  When we’re a way from a wi-fi hotspot or otherwise unable to get online, these hosted services have little to no value.

Now take this line of thinking one step further to the mobile platform.  The mobile computing revolution is just starting to take off and for it to be valuable, mobile access to data is a must-have.  This is why it’s welcome news for web workers that Google Gears is now available for some mobile handsets.

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