14 ms·

Using Gmail, Calendar and Docs without an Internet connection

141 points by antr 15y ago

csulok 15y ago
offline gmail is disappointing. it's basically the tablet version, meaning the consistent google interface is lost, labs features are lost, keyboard shortcuts are lost, theming options are lost, google nav bar is gone, etc... offline docs and offline calendar is not available but from the description, it sounds they have proper implementations.
- danberger 15y ago
  I agree. Furthermore, offline google apps don't work if you use multiple sign-in
  - ditojim 15y ago
    multi-sign in is supported for offline gmail.
- mvelie 15y ago
  The tablet version is horrible on the desktop, I don't understand why the interface had to change just to cache the email messages.
MatthewPhillips 15y ago
What a massive failure. I wonder if they realized they weren't going to hit the deadline so they decided to do a quick implementation with the tablet app. The old rumors that Gmail is a massive spaghetti mess must be true. Let's just hope they're actively rewriting it and don't think this is good enough.
- niels_olson 15y ago
  Fun fact, you're the only person here with karma over 100 (2210 when I checked). Your criticism therefore is not only brutal but reputable. There are googlers here on HN, and they are trying to make right by offline access (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2627365 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2627365). Since you develop for the Chrome app store, did that particular comment advance your cause? Are there particulars you could point them toward, or identify things they should keep in the total re-write you hope for?
  - corin_ 15y ago
    A few thousand really isn't much in HN's scale of users, it shows you aren't completely new, nothing more.
    - niels_olson 15y ago
      Well, there's only about 500 users with 2000 or more karma, but I'd still say that's roughly the baseline for "reputable": you've stuck around and made some contributions. In so far as this site only seems to keep the interest people who are interested in this scene, that seems like one of the many types of folks a googler working on this would want to do right by. And, it would seem to me that his comment wouldn't exactly make a googler feel a sense of accomplishment. Maybe you're right, they might dismiss it. But there's a non-zero chance they felt a little worse, their lunch didn't taste quite as good after reading that. And if that's the case, my point to him was to ask what purpose did that serve? Because it didn't seem like a nuanced criticism. This brings up another issue of reputation vs karma, which I posted separately: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2946896 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2946896
      - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
        Geez, I certainly don't want anyone to feel bad about themselves or have a bad day because of some flippant worthless comment I made. My opinion really isn't that important.
        mkr-hn 15y ago
        What you say matters to the person on the receiving end, even if you think it doesn't.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    I don't hope for or care for a total re-write; that's up to them. But they should be able to cache all resources with AppCache. They should be able to cache recent messages with LocalStorage. These are not new technologies; they've been around for a couple of years at least. Here's Google discussing their use of AppCache in Mobile Gmail well over 2 years ago.[1] [1] http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-html5-series-using.html http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-html...
- rachelbythebay 15y ago
  It's still August. Stuff doesn't get rushed out until the end of a quarter when OKRs are looming. At that point you can push any old thing and get away with it. In other words, check back in a month to see even worse.
- Lewisham 15y ago
  Gmail is probably Google's biggest product after search. It's also been around for a long time, so you do have to keep that in mind. I would presume the Gmail team are still working on offline, but Google prefers launch + iterate, rather than waiting for things to reach a "finished" state. This was the quickest way to get people to an offline Gmail product. DISCLAIMER: I'm an intern at Google, but have no information about these products apart from what is publicly known.
- dannyr 15y ago
  Maybe they just want a solution that people can use RIGHT NOW. What's wrong with that? I'm thankful for Google providing this solution though I'm hoping for a better one in the future. Calling it a massive failure is just mean-spirited. You call yourself an "aspiring entrepreneur" but I don't think you understand what it means to be one and actually build stuff. If you do, you wouldn't be making comments like that.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    I'm a programmer and I've received much harsher words about stuff I've written. Maybe I'm hypocritical, but I feel less of a need to bite my tongue with Google than with a HNer's weekend project. The fact is that they've been promising this feature since they discontinued Gears over a year and a half ago and to then fail in this way is both disappointing and insulting to me. It's insulting because I'm passionate about the web and I know that web applications can handle offline just as well as native applications, and their slowness to add support to their most important products contradicts that belief. And it's insulting because they've released something so that they can say they have Offline Gmail when this barely counts as that. Having separate apps, with separate UIs, and separate ways of launching, for an online and an offline version is not a customer-centric decision; it's a face-saving PR decision.
    - dannyr 15y ago
      "It's insulting because I'm passionate about the web and I know that web applications can handle offline just as well as native applications, and their slowness to add support to their most important products contradicts that belief. And it's insulting because they've released something so that they can say they have Offline Gmail when this barely counts as that." Insulting? I don't get it. What are you entitled to? That is such an arrogant statement. Can I ask what have you done to the web community since you are very passionate about it? Showing passion is not about putting other people who actually build things down. You have to realize that Google may be a big entity but it is still a group of individuals. You have read the comment from the Offline team and they have a good reason why they can't do it right now.
- nex3 15y ago
  (Offline Gmail team member here) One thing we learned early on was that making any existing system (especially one as big as Gmail) work offline had some very difficult, fundamental issues. The biggest of these is that everything that normally happens server-side must also be able to happen client-side when there's no network connection. This is a problem not only because there is a lot of server-side complexity in Gmail, but also because it changes all the time. New features are added, old behavior is changed, and if the offline code path isn't changed along with it, things have a tendency to break horribly. The only solutions to this involve having every Gmail engineer modify the offline code path whenever they touch the online, which is a large burden that we weren't willing to lay on them.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    Thanks for your response. I take this to mean that Gmail is undergoing a complete re-write. Is that correct?
    - nex3 15y ago
      I can't comment on unannounced engineering efforts, and I certainly didn't mean to imply anything about them. All I can really say is that if they wanted the primary Gmail client to support offline, then it's my personal opinion that the only tenable way to do that is by having a single code path. Whether there are plans to actually do this I don't know and couldn't talk about if I did.
  - blub 15y ago
    I think the difficulty is that none of the technologies that you are using were designed for building software applications, but for showing text and images on a screen. In other words, there is a perfectly fine solution for offline G-mail, it's called "e-mail client".
    - jorangreef 15y ago
      Actually the problem may be that OS user interfaces, for all their native functionality, have not kept pace with browsers at showing text and images on a screen. Hypertext is an innovation that is hard to ignore.
- temphn 15y ago
  This comment is completely out of line. Trashing something pretty decent on its launch day is not a sign of elevated or discerning taste, it's a sign of someone who does not understand how hard it is to ship something. Having some kind of offline Gmail (and Docs and Calendar!) is indeed a VERY big win, even if it doesn't have every conceivable feature on day one. It makes Chromebooks that much more appealing. Ok, the UI and launcher are different. That's not "massive failure", that's minimum viable product. Yeah, even Google does that.
zura 15y ago
Maybe they will finally add offline mode to Chrome... http://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+offline+mode http://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+offline+mode
aninteger 15y ago
Does anyone else remember QWK mail packets? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_%28file_format%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_%28file_format%29 I wonder if someone could take the idea of QWK and build it into modern web forums / email systems.
- mhd 15y ago
  I think the file format itself is the most trivial aspect of this whole thing. Even if you'd roll your own, you probably could cobble together some kind of XML/JSON based copy of the message DB diff within hours (or just use RSS).
1880 15y ago
While being deprecated and non-standard, the Google Gears version of offline Gmail was much better than this.
- cyber 15y ago
  Limited to Chrome, this is still non-standard.
  - nex3 15y ago
    (Offline Gmail team member here) The primary reason this is Chrome-only is because other browsers don't yet have complete implementations of relevant specs (for example the FileSystem API: http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/pub/FileSystem/ http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/pub/FileSystem/). I can't make any promises on the team's behalf, but I personally would like to see it working on Firefox as well at some point.
    - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
      Mozilla has said they don't plan on supporting the FileSystem API.
      - Triumvark 15y ago
        True. Cite: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI They plan FileReader and FileWriter though. Now I wonder: a) What is Moz leaving out? Why? b) Which of the other items from FileSystem does the Google team need, if any?
        nex3 15y ago
        It looks like they're leaving out everything in the spec I linked above. Currently this is the only way to persist File objects locally, although it looks like they're planning to make that possible through IndexedDB instead.
      - 15y ago
marcin 15y ago
Gmail is clearly more of a beta than a functional product (namely attachements don't seem to work), but the biggest question/implication of this change I see is evaporation of any business model (as in 'the ads are gone'). Besides that - I like the UI a lot, but for any offline access to make sens it has to be rock solid (which this obviously isn't).
- antr 15y ago
  in an offline mode how would you monetise offline ad clicks? google's business model is based on ctr not cpm. are you thinking of caching ads/pages too?
  - marcin 15y ago
    Deck is doing that somehow (caching ad impressions at least) - so it is an addressable issue. However - this app works both in online and offline mode, so my point was not really touching the offline ad problem - thanks for pointing it out.
  - stuartmemo 15y ago
    I don't imagine they need to monetise this part. The offline app simply makes Gmail even better and gives those who use desktop clients one less reason to stick with them. As a result of this more people will end up using the normal online app and therefore clicking more ads.
    - marcin 15y ago
      The thing is - with the new interface, that is perfectly accessible through the browser AND makes sure your offline is in-sync why would people carry on using the regular version?
- nex3 15y ago
  (Offline Gmail team member here) Attachments should work, with a few caveats. Due to some annoying quirks of the HTML5 FileSystem API, there's a whitelist of supported file extensions. This includes everything useful we could think of, but it's not exhaustive.
ditojim 15y ago
after installing the app off the web store, this works in the background, all the time. that's cool.
casemorton 15y ago
I'm confused. Is there a reason why I'm supposed to be excited for this? It just looks like a waste of battery life to me.
voxmatt 15y ago
I think Google needs to refocus on the real problem: not having internet access. [joking, but seriously...]
- davorak 15y ago
  I think they do take it seriously.
pointyhat 15y ago
At the risk of sounding like a troll, which I'm genuinely not trying to be, this problem is more than solved when using Outlook with hosted Exchange or Office 365. That works absolutely perfectly over unreliable connections and in offline mode. It's also been around for nigh on 10-15 years now.
- tommi 15y ago
  Outlook with hosted Exchange or Office 365 is a solution which suits some people. However, there are many for whom the Gmail, Calendar and Docs combo works better. Consider money, sharing and other factors and you'll see why the "been around for nigh on 10-15 years" doesn't mean much.
  - pointyhat 15y ago
    Money - if you know what you are doing, you get the partner action pack which costs me 259 GBP a year (22GBP/month) and gives me 10 seats of a lot of cheap software including Windows 7 Pro and Office 2010 Professional [1]. Office 365 is 4 GBP per month per user which costs me less than my monthly toilet roll bill. Sharing - that's the point of exchange and outlook. It works and it supports all the relevant modern interoperability. Other factors - ? [1] https://partner.microsoft.com/40112699 https://partner.microsoft.com/40112699
    - tommi 15y ago
      There's huge difference between easy access costing nothing extra and "knowing what you are doing" and 259GBP / year. For you, the setup you have chosen suits probably very well but please understand that it's not for everybody. I bet there are many people who would enjoy offline features and do not have the money and know-how for Outlook with hosted Exchange. Relevant modern interoperability is a very loose concept. There are many types of sharing. Consider that with Google docs you can share a document for example as a web page for free. Other factors such as already using one Google product such as Gmail and Google Contacts and the synergy of using other Google products. But yes, I agree with you partially that this problem is solved. Just not for everybody.
micampe 15y ago
I don't understand why this is a Chrome app instead of a link.
- bzbarsky 15y ago
  Because it uses proprietary stuff that other browsers don't implement and that will never be standardized, for one thing....

141 points by antr 15y ago

offline gmail is disappointing. it's basically the tablet version, meaning the consistent google interface is lost, labs features are lost, keyboard shortcuts are lost, theming options are lost, google nav bar is gone, etc... offline docs and offline calendar is not available but from the description, it sounds they have proper implementations.

danberger 15y ago
I agree. Furthermore, offline google apps don't work if you use multiple sign-in
- ditojim 15y ago
  multi-sign in is supported for offline gmail.
mvelie 15y ago
The tablet version is horrible on the desktop, I don't understand why the interface had to change just to cache the email messages.

MatthewPhillips 15y ago

What a massive failure. I wonder if they realized they weren't going to hit the deadline so they decided to do a quick implementation with the tablet app. The old rumors that Gmail is a massive spaghetti mess must be true. Let's just hope they're actively rewriting it and don't think this is good enough.

niels_olson 15y ago
Fun fact, you're the only person here with karma over 100 (2210 when I checked). Your criticism therefore is not only brutal but reputable. There are googlers here on HN, and they are trying to make right by offline access (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2627365 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2627365). Since you develop for the Chrome app store, did that particular comment advance your cause? Are there particulars you could point them toward, or identify things they should keep in the total re-write you hope for?
- corin_ 15y ago
  A few thousand really isn't much in HN's scale of users, it shows you aren't completely new, nothing more.
  - niels_olson 15y ago
    Well, there's only about 500 users with 2000 or more karma, but I'd still say that's roughly the baseline for "reputable": you've stuck around and made some contributions. In so far as this site only seems to keep the interest people who are interested in this scene, that seems like one of the many types of folks a googler working on this would want to do right by. And, it would seem to me that his comment wouldn't exactly make a googler feel a sense of accomplishment. Maybe you're right, they might dismiss it. But there's a non-zero chance they felt a little worse, their lunch didn't taste quite as good after reading that. And if that's the case, my point to him was to ask what purpose did that serve? Because it didn't seem like a nuanced criticism. This brings up another issue of reputation vs karma, which I posted separately: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2946896 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2946896
    - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
      Geez, I certainly don't want anyone to feel bad about themselves or have a bad day because of some flippant worthless comment I made. My opinion really isn't that important.
      - mkr-hn 15y ago
        What you say matters to the person on the receiving end, even if you think it doesn't.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  I don't hope for or care for a total re-write; that's up to them. But they should be able to cache all resources with AppCache. They should be able to cache recent messages with LocalStorage. These are not new technologies; they've been around for a couple of years at least. Here's Google discussing their use of AppCache in Mobile Gmail well over 2 years ago.[1] [1] http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-html5-series-using.html http://googlecode.blogspot.com/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-html...
rachelbythebay 15y ago
It's still August. Stuff doesn't get rushed out until the end of a quarter when OKRs are looming. At that point you can push any old thing and get away with it. In other words, check back in a month to see even worse.
Lewisham 15y ago
Gmail is probably Google's biggest product after search. It's also been around for a long time, so you do have to keep that in mind. I would presume the Gmail team are still working on offline, but Google prefers launch + iterate, rather than waiting for things to reach a "finished" state. This was the quickest way to get people to an offline Gmail product. DISCLAIMER: I'm an intern at Google, but have no information about these products apart from what is publicly known.
dannyr 15y ago
Maybe they just want a solution that people can use RIGHT NOW. What's wrong with that? I'm thankful for Google providing this solution though I'm hoping for a better one in the future. Calling it a massive failure is just mean-spirited. You call yourself an "aspiring entrepreneur" but I don't think you understand what it means to be one and actually build stuff. If you do, you wouldn't be making comments like that.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  I'm a programmer and I've received much harsher words about stuff I've written. Maybe I'm hypocritical, but I feel less of a need to bite my tongue with Google than with a HNer's weekend project. The fact is that they've been promising this feature since they discontinued Gears over a year and a half ago and to then fail in this way is both disappointing and insulting to me. It's insulting because I'm passionate about the web and I know that web applications can handle offline just as well as native applications, and their slowness to add support to their most important products contradicts that belief. And it's insulting because they've released something so that they can say they have Offline Gmail when this barely counts as that. Having separate apps, with separate UIs, and separate ways of launching, for an online and an offline version is not a customer-centric decision; it's a face-saving PR decision.
  - dannyr 15y ago
    "It's insulting because I'm passionate about the web and I know that web applications can handle offline just as well as native applications, and their slowness to add support to their most important products contradicts that belief. And it's insulting because they've released something so that they can say they have Offline Gmail when this barely counts as that." Insulting? I don't get it. What are you entitled to? That is such an arrogant statement. Can I ask what have you done to the web community since you are very passionate about it? Showing passion is not about putting other people who actually build things down. You have to realize that Google may be a big entity but it is still a group of individuals. You have read the comment from the Offline team and they have a good reason why they can't do it right now.
nex3 15y ago
(Offline Gmail team member here) One thing we learned early on was that making any existing system (especially one as big as Gmail) work offline had some very difficult, fundamental issues. The biggest of these is that everything that normally happens server-side must also be able to happen client-side when there's no network connection. This is a problem not only because there is a lot of server-side complexity in Gmail, but also because it changes all the time. New features are added, old behavior is changed, and if the offline code path isn't changed along with it, things have a tendency to break horribly. The only solutions to this involve having every Gmail engineer modify the offline code path whenever they touch the online, which is a large burden that we weren't willing to lay on them.
- MatthewPhillips 15y ago
  Thanks for your response. I take this to mean that Gmail is undergoing a complete re-write. Is that correct?
  - nex3 15y ago
    I can't comment on unannounced engineering efforts, and I certainly didn't mean to imply anything about them. All I can really say is that if they wanted the primary Gmail client to support offline, then it's my personal opinion that the only tenable way to do that is by having a single code path. Whether there are plans to actually do this I don't know and couldn't talk about if I did.
- blub 15y ago
  I think the difficulty is that none of the technologies that you are using were designed for building software applications, but for showing text and images on a screen. In other words, there is a perfectly fine solution for offline G-mail, it's called "e-mail client".
  - jorangreef 15y ago
    Actually the problem may be that OS user interfaces, for all their native functionality, have not kept pace with browsers at showing text and images on a screen. Hypertext is an innovation that is hard to ignore.
temphn 15y ago
This comment is completely out of line. Trashing something pretty decent on its launch day is not a sign of elevated or discerning taste, it's a sign of someone who does not understand how hard it is to ship something. Having some kind of offline Gmail (and Docs and Calendar!) is indeed a VERY big win, even if it doesn't have every conceivable feature on day one. It makes Chromebooks that much more appealing. Ok, the UI and launcher are different. That's not "massive failure", that's minimum viable product. Yeah, even Google does that.

zura 15y ago

Maybe they will finally add offline mode to Chrome... http://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+offline+mode http://www.google.com/search?q=chrome+offline+mode

aninteger 15y ago

Does anyone else remember QWK mail packets? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_%28file_format%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWK_%28file_format%29 I wonder if someone could take the idea of QWK and build it into modern web forums / email systems.

mhd 15y ago
I think the file format itself is the most trivial aspect of this whole thing. Even if you'd roll your own, you probably could cobble together some kind of XML/JSON based copy of the message DB diff within hours (or just use RSS).

1880 15y ago

While being deprecated and non-standard, the Google Gears version of offline Gmail was much better than this.

cyber 15y ago
Limited to Chrome, this is still non-standard.
- nex3 15y ago
  (Offline Gmail team member here) The primary reason this is Chrome-only is because other browsers don't yet have complete implementations of relevant specs (for example the FileSystem API: http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/pub/FileSystem/ http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/file-system/pub/FileSystem/). I can't make any promises on the team's behalf, but I personally would like to see it working on Firefox as well at some point.
  - MatthewPhillips 15y ago
    Mozilla has said they don't plan on supporting the FileSystem API.
    - Triumvark 15y ago
      True. Cite: https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI They plan FileReader and FileWriter though. Now I wonder: a) What is Moz leaving out? Why? b) Which of the other items from FileSystem does the Google team need, if any?
      - nex3 15y ago
        It looks like they're leaving out everything in the spec I linked above. Currently this is the only way to persist File objects locally, although it looks like they're planning to make that possible through IndexedDB instead.
    - 15y ago

marcin 15y ago

Gmail is clearly more of a beta than a functional product (namely attachements don't seem to work), but the biggest question/implication of this change I see is evaporation of any business model (as in 'the ads are gone'). Besides that - I like the UI a lot, but for any offline access to make sens it has to be rock solid (which this obviously isn't).

antr 15y ago
in an offline mode how would you monetise offline ad clicks? google's business model is based on ctr not cpm. are you thinking of caching ads/pages too?
- marcin 15y ago
  Deck is doing that somehow (caching ad impressions at least) - so it is an addressable issue. However - this app works both in online and offline mode, so my point was not really touching the offline ad problem - thanks for pointing it out.
- stuartmemo 15y ago
  I don't imagine they need to monetise this part. The offline app simply makes Gmail even better and gives those who use desktop clients one less reason to stick with them. As a result of this more people will end up using the normal online app and therefore clicking more ads.
  - marcin 15y ago
    The thing is - with the new interface, that is perfectly accessible through the browser AND makes sure your offline is in-sync why would people carry on using the regular version?
nex3 15y ago
(Offline Gmail team member here) Attachments should work, with a few caveats. Due to some annoying quirks of the HTML5 FileSystem API, there's a whitelist of supported file extensions. This includes everything useful we could think of, but it's not exhaustive.

ditojim 15y ago

after installing the app off the web store, this works in the background, all the time. that's cool.

casemorton 15y ago

I'm confused. Is there a reason why I'm supposed to be excited for this? It just looks like a waste of battery life to me.

voxmatt 15y ago

I think Google needs to refocus on the real problem: not having internet access. [joking, but seriously...]

davorak 15y ago
I think they do take it seriously.

pointyhat 15y ago

At the risk of sounding like a troll, which I'm genuinely not trying to be, this problem is more than solved when using Outlook with hosted Exchange or Office 365. That works absolutely perfectly over unreliable connections and in offline mode. It's also been around for nigh on 10-15 years now.

tommi 15y ago
Outlook with hosted Exchange or Office 365 is a solution which suits some people. However, there are many for whom the Gmail, Calendar and Docs combo works better. Consider money, sharing and other factors and you'll see why the "been around for nigh on 10-15 years" doesn't mean much.
- pointyhat 15y ago
  Money - if you know what you are doing, you get the partner action pack which costs me 259 GBP a year (22GBP/month) and gives me 10 seats of a lot of cheap software including Windows 7 Pro and Office 2010 Professional [1]. Office 365 is 4 GBP per month per user which costs me less than my monthly toilet roll bill. Sharing - that's the point of exchange and outlook. It works and it supports all the relevant modern interoperability. Other factors - ? [1] https://partner.microsoft.com/40112699 https://partner.microsoft.com/40112699
  - tommi 15y ago
    There's huge difference between easy access costing nothing extra and "knowing what you are doing" and 259GBP / year. For you, the setup you have chosen suits probably very well but please understand that it's not for everybody. I bet there are many people who would enjoy offline features and do not have the money and know-how for Outlook with hosted Exchange. Relevant modern interoperability is a very loose concept. There are many types of sharing. Consider that with Google docs you can share a document for example as a web page for free. Other factors such as already using one Google product such as Gmail and Google Contacts and the synergy of using other Google products. But yes, I agree with you partially that this problem is solved. Just not for everybody.

micampe 15y ago

I don't understand why this is a Chrome app instead of a link.

bzbarsky 15y ago
Because it uses proprietary stuff that other browsers don't implement and that will never be standardized, for one thing....