Hold on ! Don’t panic yet.
Gmail is not dead. Infact it’s alive and kicking. The Gmail folks at the Mountain View Giant ( read : Google) quietly rolled out a major feature on Tuesday. Its major because most of us haven’t seen anything like this before. What is it then? Its called “Offline Gmail”.
So, offline gmail – what is it exactly? To put it simply – It lets Gmail act like a desktop application. Just like Outlook or thunderbird used for email. How is that possible? The technology that makes this possible is called Google Gears. It is a plugin which when installed into your favourite web browser allows Gears enabled websites to go Offline ( literally). So, your Gears enabled web applications (Gmail for instance) will run smoothly even when the internet connection is not available and also giving you almost the same user experience as if you were online. You can even create a desktop shortcut for your favourite web app and use it to launch it anytime you want irrespective of whether you have connectivity or not.
Among other things Offline Gmail lets you read mail, open attachments, access the address book and compose mails to be sent later when net connection is available. Read what the Gmail blog has to say about it. It uses a local cache on your computer to achieve this. But to use this nifty feature you need to have Gears installed. The feature is available in the Labs tab in the settings screen in Gmail. Gmail detects if you have Gears installed. So, if you don’t have it you won’t see the option to turn the feature on. So go get it from here. http://gears.google.com/
One final thought – Gmail is not the first Web application to go offline ofcourse. Several other apps like Google Docs, Zoho Mail, Google Reader and MySpace are already Gears enabled.
And an afterthought – Microsoft too upgraded its email service ( MSN Hotmail). They added POP3 support. POP3 is essentially the protocol which lets you download a copy of all your emails on your local hard drive using an email client like outlook. By the way, Gmail has had this feature since a long time ago. Grow up Redmond…grow up.
Google Gears is an Open Source Project :)
Happy Browsing !
Filed under: Technology | Tagged: Gears, Gmail, Google, Open Source, Web Application
