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Content Tagged with Gears + showcase
Addressbook: An example of the Form History Pattern
One of the examples that Ben and I give in our State of Ajax talk at Google I/O today revolves around form history.
We were thinking about the case for Undo on the Web that Aza Raskin is proposing and it got us thinking about the usage patterns of form data.
An example that got me was the Address Book application on the Mac. I find myself storing past addresses in the general "Notes" section at the bottom, but what if history was built into the system so I could go back in time? This could be a nice metaphor in general that goes beyond undo.
I took this use case and put together a working example that uses Gears to store the history locally so it can be speedy through the history.
The slider component comes from Script.aculo.us, and you can check out all of the code.
In the video below I show the application in action and then do a quick code walk through:
This is just the beginning of course. A slider if fun, but it would probably be more usable if it was simply left and right arrows that click through the versions, or at least putting tacks onto the slider.
Google Docs now runs offline with Gears
Being able to have your documents stored up in the cloud, but also saved away for the time where you don't have connectivity is important, and today the Google Docs team supports local service via Google Gears.
I have been using this ability for awhile, and I have personally seen a couple of side effects:
- I boot up the computer at times in which I wouldn't before hand as I know I can get access to this content (as well as Google Reader of course)
- The experience is a lot faster even in a connected or slightly connected environment as it keeps working even if service is bumpy, say, on a Google Shuttle to work!
Having things continue to just work as you go in and out of service is a great feeling. You trust the system more.
If you are still new to Gears, Ben Lisbakken has published a tutorial that he has as a screencast. Take a peak and get up to speed.
Buxfer: Another Personal Finance 2.0 Site
Buxfer is another personal finance site, a la Mint.
Todd Ritter reports:
Buxfer has a few interesting features that differentiate it from the others. While it offers auto-syncing of transaction information with your banks and credit cards, budgeting, and expense analysis, Buxfer also has three key characteristics:
- Shared Finances - Buxfer allows you to create groups and assign specific finances to those groups to monitor who owes or receives money. For example, you could create a "Cable Bill" group and assign yourself and your roommates to the group to track who has forked over the cash for the Super Deluxe Sports Package.
- Google Gears - By using Buxfer's Google Gears support, you can keep all of your private financial data on your own computer, instead of Buxfer's servers. The other personal finance sites store your information on their servers, thus out of your control.
- Mobile Access - Buxfer has a mobile phone interface and an iPhone-specific interface for accessing your account remotely. You can also use Twitter or SMS to get account balances or to be notified of low balances, large withdrawals, etc.
Buxfer uses a perverted Prototype, and looks fairly Gmail-y with the top right red 'Loading...' and such. It looks nice.
Zoho Writer Offline with Editing
Zoho Writer was quick to release offline support using Gears, which allows you to carry read-only views of your data around when you were offline.
This was just the first step in their offline support, and now they have announced the next step. This new version allows you to edit on the road with a synchronization system that keeps you sane:
Mindmeister: Take your mind map offline
Mindmeister has taken their mind map tool and now allow you to map offline.
The tool itself is a nice Ruby on Rails application (includes pink fade effects! yellow is so 2006) that gives you a visual canvas to play with your mind.
Their approach to offline is similar to Google Reader in that the user has to say "hey, take me offline". The interface to that is a nice little slider widget. At the point your maps are sync'd down to the local store.
I would love to see it auto sync, and I noticed a couple of issues when I actually went offline but didn't tell the tool first (would be nice to have the tool grok that) but the mind map tool in general is a nice app to use. It feels like Geni.
The Digg Oracle: Data mining on the client
Brian Shaler noticed that almost a year ago, Digg removed the "search your own
Diggs" feature, to the dismay of thousands of Digg users. To explain
why the feature had not yet returned, they cited hardware and software
solutions as being very complicated and expensive.
Brian decided to re-implement the feature himself using the Digg APIs, and we end up with The Digg Oracle:
Because the dataset is relatively small and user-specific, performing
tasks like searching/filtering and sorting can easily be done on the
client, using Google Gears. The tool downloads the selected user's
entire voting history, indexes the stories in the local DB, then does
all the sorting/searching without connecting to Digg's servers.
Here we see an original query, and the application starts to download the users usage data:
When the data is loaded, searching and filtering the data is extremely fast, even if you use Kevin Rose as your sample :) This is a great non-offline example of using the database and workerpool components.
Zoho Writer Goes Offline with Gears
The Zoho office team has released a Zoho Writer product with offline support via Google Gears.
In the first release, with Gears installed, you are able to tell the system how many documents to save for offline interaction. They are starting with read-only views, and will then roll out the ability to save docs back, and then further moving out offline functionality into the other products in the office suite.
The other major feature to come in today is the ability to add comments to a document. You can choose any part of the document and click on the 'Comments' icon at the bottom-right of a document and add multiple comments. The comments then show up as a div bubble.
It is great to see all of the third party applications starting to roll out applications using Google Gears, and I am looking forward to watching how the offline interaction models change over time.
Remember The Milk Offline
Remember The Milk is one of the early Web 2.0 entrants that keeps innovating. I think that they were probably the first popular-non-google web applicationto go offline with Gears.
They decided to take an approach similar to Google Reader's offline model:
What can I do offline?
Just about everything that's possible online with Remember The Milk now works offline too -- not only can you access your lists, but you can add new tasks and notes, edit existing tasks (complete, postpone, prioritise, tag, and change due dates to your heart's content), use your own personal tasks search engine, create new Smart Lists, and more.
We asked Omar Kilani of the team a couple of questions about the offline release / experience:
Why did you take the step of asking the user to go offline (as reader does) versus just taking the todo list data offline in the background?
The app state is always in sync, and everything is updated in the
background (data is stored as in-memory JS objects, and sqlite is used
as a backing store in a write-through fashion). So you can pull the
plug, lose your Internet connection, etc, and the app will notice and
switch you to offline mode.
Right now, we take a sort of hybrid modal/modeless approach --
regardless of whether the app syncs in the background, we also thought
it was important to allow the user to control the mode they're in and
request a "sync".
I think an analogy to this is the 'Get Mail' button in email clients --
most mail clients check for new mail in the background, and if you're
using IMAP, you get notified immediately of new mail, but there's some
security in seeing that button there, and knowing you can press it. :)
I think we need to improve the UI aspects of this, and we're going to
look into doing that very soon. :)
How was the experience using Gears for offline?
Gears is awesome, and I believe it is the future of offline web
applications. :)
I personally feel it gives you all the right building blocks to do
whatever needs to be done to take an app offline.
What would you like to see the framework give you?
- Progress indication from LocalServer! (This would be very helpful in
communicating with the user for the situation described above with
initial manifest download - A more stable WorkerPool. (It's currently pretty easy to cause a
browser crash with it. - Off the top of my head, how about bundle support in LocalServer?
Perhaps it can go download a Zip/JAR with all your files in it, and have
the manifest entries point into that. That would be pretty sweet.
Flex-based SQLAdmin for Google Gears
Christophe Coenraets always brings the goods when you need a quick demo. He created the SQLAdmin tool for Google Gears that Kevin Lynch demonstrated yesterday.
This app does have the side effect of showing me that I am not a mousey person. I kept clicking on "CREATE DATABASE" when I was meant to drag and drop it onto the SQL query box. Darn drag and drop on the web ;)
It is cool that Christophe has given us a prettier UI for playing with the local database (there is a dbquery tool in the Google Gears SDK too), and I am sure we will see more great work from Adobe (and their work always looks nice doesn't it!).
