Converge

First, we got ethernet connections all over the office. Then we got wireless at home. (Then IT stopped freaking out and installed wireless at work.) Then we found lots of useful wifi hotspots. Then came cellular broadband.

There aren’t many places in the urban sphere anymore where we can’t get a speedy, reliable connection to the Internet. There’s just one big exception: airplanes. We’ve seen a few baby steps toward in-flight Internet, but for most of us, the metal tube is an network-free zone.

Yes, there are benefits to this - no loud phone conversations, no new mail dribbling in while you’re pursuing Inbox Zero. But, many of us have shifted our email, task lists, and other key operations to web apps; five hours on a transcontinental flight without those apps is a long time to be deprived of your tools, and improvising with text files and sticky notes just means more work once you’re online again.

Google Gears has been around for awhile now, but I’m only writing about it now because it’s just now having a real impact on how I work when I’m not connected to the tubes.

Google Reader

When Google launched Gears, Reader was the first Google tool to sport the functionality. (That was the case till just a few days ago.) I track all my feeds in Reader, so the ability to download up to 2000 articles, read offline, share and star them, and sync up later, gave me reams of reading material and ended in-flight purgatory.

Remember the Milk

I love this task management system: it integrates with Gmail, Google Calendar, Quicksilver, Twitter, mobile, etc., etc., which means you have all kinds of ways to get stuff into the Trusted System and track it. RTM was also an early adopter of Gears, enabling full offline access and syncing.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

As I write this, Google is progressively rolling out offline functionality to Docs users. The Docs implementation is somewhat more sophisticated: it syncs and then responds automatically, going local when you’re offline, reconnecting and syncing when you’ve acquired a connection again.

I’m highlighting these three services because there the ones that matter most to me. Other webapps also use Gears - a list is here.

Pre-Board Workflow

Now, when I’m about to pull the plug on the Internet, I open three tabs in Firefox, one each for Google Reader, Google Docs and Remember the Milk. Docs auto-syncs, and for the other two applications, I press the button to go offline. The switch to offline is nearly immediate, except for Reader, which downloads articles. This generally takes less than a minute.

When I open my laptop after take-off, I have access to these apps in an environment which mimics almost exactly the experience of being connected.

Almost. You can write and edit documents, create, tag, modify and delete tasks in RTM, and highlight blog posts to share on Google Reader. You can’t make changes to application settings, and in Docs, you can’t create a new document while offline. (This is also the case, at last check, with Zoho Writer’s offline functionality.)

In fact, this thing with creating a new document is the only thing that regularly annoys me about offline Docs. But I created a simple workaround: an empty document called “offline notes.” Any new document I want to create while offline goes on this empty page. Once I’m online, I copy it to another new document or rename the existing file and make a new “offline notes” file.

What if something goes wrong with sync and all your offline work disappears, never to be seen again? I take an extra precaution and copy the text into TextEdit, Word or Pages, so I have a local backup just in case.

Offline Wishlist

Every geek has their own version of this list. Mine includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook, Google Wiki, Backpack, Buzzword and Wordpress software. I don’t doubt for a second that developers of these webapps are working on it, whether they’re building it on Gears, or Adobe’s offline platform or whatever.

But web-to-local software integration also helps bridge the gap. Gmail POP3 and IMAP means I can write email in Mail.app or any other traditional email program and send it when I’m back online, and Spanning Sync (or similar programs) seamlessly keeps iCal and Gcal in lock-step, making iCal my offline Gcal.

There are a few keys to making this functionality successful - and the centerpiece is a seam-free blurring of boundaries between online and offline. Ubiquitous wifi is reducing the white space in between our internet connections; technology like Gears helps to make the white space somewhat irrelevant.

UPDATE 6/10/08: Gears now works with Firefox 3!