As I am still trying to catch up with my Feedreader, I stumbled across „Offline Gmail” by Google Labs from January 27, 2009:

Today we’re starting to roll out an experimental feature in Gmail Labs that should help fill in those gaps: offline Gmail. So even if you’re offline, you can open your web browser, go to gmail.com, and get to your mail just like you’re used to.
…
you can choose to use „flaky connection mode,” which is somewhere in between: it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background.

I was as flabbergasted by this „announcment” (Offline Gmail is still marked „experimental), as I just don’t grok it. Mobile Internet and WLAN are inventions that are not that old. There was a life before the whole „always on” hype. Large areas are still without proper wireless (or wirebound) broadband connections but companies like Google and the A-Bloggers/Twitters/Writers behave like there is WiFi everywhere – which just isn’t the case.

Now they are catching up by reinventing Sync for the Xth time, retrofitting systems and architectures for offline mode that were never ment to be taken offline. With the expected results.

That’s why I like Notes. Replication (sync) was built in there since the first release in 1989. So I can work online, connected to my server(s) – with real clustering, not that glorified cold standbys Microsoft offers – but also offline, if I can’t get a connection on the airplain, in the train or in the Waldviertel. And all that eiter by switching a „location” or even running in that seamless „flaky connection mode” Google is so proud about.
And that worked with modem dial dial-up connections in the 90ties, with broadband internet connections after that, with the now hyped mobile internet offerings and will probably work with the next cool technology that comes after that.

And I have nice features like „only get me the mail, not the attachment”. Oh, and offline mode usually works with every Notes-based application too. Nice, eh?

Tagged as: lotus notes, offline, online, rant, web 2.0, working | Author: Martin Leyrer
[Sonntag, 20090222, 21:07 | permanent link | 0 Kommentar(e)