Online/offline web apps
I do all my writing in Google Docs these days, and I love it. It’s simple and straightforward — I can write my stories, and it saves them for me and helps me organize them, and that’s it. It doesn’t have tons of fancy bells and whistles that I don’t need and it lets me fit a whole lot of text on the screen instead of cluttering it up with toolbars and rulers and stuff. And nicest of all, no matter where I am, if I can get to the internet I can work on my writing.
The problem is that when my internet connection goes down, like it did today, I can’t access any of my work. There was a problem with our cable service for about three hours this afternoon, and I sat here stewing, thinking “What can I do to pass the time until it’s fixed? Oh, I know. I’ll do some writing!” And then I realized my fallacy.
There is evidence that Google is planning on making an offline version of Docs, but right now it looks like it requires running the code on a local webserver installation, which is not optimal. Come on! It’s almost entirely javascript already — why not make use of the nicely-polished, awesome offline storage solution dojo.storage? It uses one of any number of available offline storage providers (a fancy name for “things on your computer that let your browser save stuff to disk”) to allow you to store data locally, and lets you sync the local and remote copies when you do have internet access. There are already demos showing that it works safely. Google really needs to take advantage of this neat thing, to make Docs available even when my network connection isn’t.
I briefly pondered trying to integrate Greasemonkey and dojo.storage to forcibly add this feature to Docs, but then realized that first, it would take way too much effort to both decipher Google’s code and learn dojo.storage, and second, I don’t have the time for that sort of stuff.
March 29th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
Don’t forget that Google Desktop Search incorporates a local web server, as well. There could be some non-hokey reasons to use the same architecture - like retaining location independence in searching, even with local storage.
March 30th, 2007 at 5:54 am
Oh, huh. I don’t know much about GDS, mainly because I use Linux primarily and there is no GDS for Linux yet. But if they’ve already got a webserver sitting there available, then it does make sense to use it. Neat.