23 Musings

Google have announced the launch of Google Gears for Mobile.

I'm a regular user of mobile web apps on my phone, especially when travelling by train, and there's nothing worse than finding your signal dies and you lose connectivity at a crucial point. Well no longer; now developers can make their mobile apps Gears ready which will enable you to keep working until a connection returns.

I can already think of some great ideas for it; an offline blogger mobile interface which allowed you to write your blog posts offline, then connect to upload. Or maybe an offline mobile email app. And better still a mobile download of Google Calendars (or other online office apps) with both online and offline synchronisation capability!

It's currently only available for Internet Explorer Mobile so you're pretty much stuck unless you have a Windows smartphone, but expect it to go to other phone platforms pretty quickly.

This could be a great addition to Android, imagine a phone operating system which allows full on/offline synchronisation with all your favourite web apps available. That would be very cool!

More here from Google Code, including the video below.

It's been a while since Zoho announced their offline capabilities using Google Gears (back in August in fact). At the time I blogged about their announcement of offline read capability with the write functionality coming in a matter of weeks.

Well, they've now announced full offline functionality. Still using Google Gears the feature will allow you to finish off that document while disconnected from the web and then synchronise changes when you connect again.

The functionality is only available for Zoho Writer at the moment, but I'd hope to see it rolled out across their suite of products soon.

Interestingly, Zoho have also spotted the announcements about Live Documents. They've responded with a post on their blog about the revenue claims made by Sabeer Bhatia.

It's going to be interesting in the online office market. I still think Google may have something up their sleeves which could make them dominant, but who do you think will be the winners?

Or at least it will be soon...

For ages I've been waiting for some offline functionality to arrive for Google Docs to allow me to work offline on spreadsheets and documents and then work online on them later, keeping them synchronised. I've been expecting this to arrive from Google in the form of a Gears application but it seems like everyone is dying to beat them to the launch.

Docsyncer is in private beta at the moment and promises full on/offline synchronisation between your Microsoft Office documents and Google Docs. Docsyncer will run quietly in the background on your PC and upload (and download) any changes made to documents in either environment (desktop or online).

This is fantastic news! I can't wait to try it, being an avid user of Google Docs this will aid my productivity hugely! How long Docsyncer will remain an independent company and not just another part of Google is anyones guess...

I blogged the other day about the new feature in Gmail to view a Powerpoint presentation within your browser and surmised at the end that it may be the first step to releasing it as an app. It seems I was right. An interview with Matthew Glotzbach, director of product management in Google's enterprise division in PCWorld says exactly that!

He says "Presentation is a feature of Google Documents, it's not as much building a separate presentation application. We are building this ability to present from a document."

Sounds good to me! Google Apps is brilliant and I use it just as much as Microsoft Office now especially for the collaborative nature and portability.

Other forthcoming additions to Google Apps discussed are video, note-taking, blogging and group-discussion applications. The article also says that Google are aiming to establish parity between the offline and online capabilities of its productivity suite. This will be the killer piece of the online office suite and will utilise the Google Gears API's.

Once offline ability is added I may well throw away Microsoft Office for good!