Gmail: Gearing Up

I’ve been a fan of Gears and a user since the day Google introduced it, and two years later, the long delayed but much anticipated unveiling of Gears for Gmail makes the technology more important to me; but the bottom line is, Gmail is more important to me, too.

In the last (almost) 5 years I’ve been using Gmail, I’ve used a variety of email software to access it, from Outlook to Thunderbird, Apple Mail to Entourage. And while I’ve never had major issues with how Gmail’s IMAP works, there have been a few annoyances and a variety of tweaks have cleared some of them. but not others.

So, inevitably, I return to the web interface, and that’s why extending the capabilities of desktop software to Gmail in the browser has been at the top of my wishlist.

It’s a beta product and I’ve encountered some minor problems with it, but I’ve not lost any email, and frankly, I’m used to a few quirks with Gears on Google Reader and Docs, so I don’t get too ruffled by it.

I’m about 28,000 feet over eastern Washington state as I write this, and my core tools are open and working: Gmail, Google Docs and Google Reader… all of them running on Gears. It won’t be long before Internet access is available on most domestic mainline aircraft, so we’ll have reached the final frontier. But even then there will always be slow or flaky connections that we encounter – times when it’s easier to “work local” rather than fight the net. The real power of Gears is how it creates a seamless experience, bridging online and offline.