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It's funny how GrinningFool seems to be associating "online" apps with cloud-based services (Google docs, dropbox, etc.) and thus equating offline with their pr
by 205guy 13y ago
It's funny how GrinningFool seems to be associating "online" apps with cloud-based services (Google docs, dropbox, etc.) and thus equating offline with their pre-cloud iterations.
I think the OP's intent applies to every app that uses data (pretty much most apps except self-contained games). Think of something like Foursquare (remember them?) that is geo-based, yet totally dependent on communicating to their server. I never used the app, but how did it handle not having a data connection? Better yet, look at the iPhone's built in Mail app. It creates an outbox for any email I try to write and send while offline (so it can handle being offline), but at the same time, it gives me a no-connection pop-up warning for almost every action I take, which is understandable, but also not very usable.
Also, the old offline-only apps are NOT the same (in terms of UI and behavioer) because the new offline-aware apps have to live in both worlds. They must do work when connected and "cache" work (both up- and down-stream) when not connected--and they must do this seamlessly even when the connection can come and go without notice or predictable duration. I think it's this dual nature that the OP is talking about and I agree it is a new paradigm that most apps don't handle gracefully.
- GrinningFool 13y agoI don't think I was making any association between online & cloud that wasn't inferred from the article itself. I could be mistaken though. Desktop mail clients have been queueing mail for delivery since their inception (as have MTAs but that's out of scope here). A desktop mail client also has to live in both worlds - while you have a connection you expect to be able to get near-real-time notification of new messages; yet while you're offline you expect to be able to view most of your message content as well as compose and queue messages. You more-or-less expect to be unaware that you're offline. Firefox supports an offline mode where all content is served from cache (I'm not sure if Chrome does, haven't used it recently). Switching into and out of it isn't very graceful or automatic, but it is there and fairly well done. Which leads back to my point. I agree it should be done gracefully, and will concede that the kinds of data have changed. However, at heart it has been done previously, and more-or-less gracefully. In an age of always-connected phones, web apps, and a world confined to the browser, those lessons seem to have been forgotten - I just wouldn't want to see this go the route of re-learning them from first principles.