In January, Google released an offline version of Gmail based on Google Gears. Last month, it began offering an offline version of Google Calendar to enterprise app customers. Today, the rest of us get to try the offline calendar, which is also based on Google Gears.
Once you click on the “Offline” link at the top of the page, the application asks you once to enable Google Gears for the Calendar. After you do that, it allows you to read your calendar when you are not connected to the Internet. A Calendar icon appears on your desktop. When you click on it, your browser opens up to show your recent schedule (it only goes back a month). For the most part, the offline version is read-only. You cannot edit existing entries until are back online. However, you can add new entries.
There are obviously some syncing issues going on here, but it seems that Google should be able to figure out how to let you edit your calendar and then sync once you are connected. Without that ability, it is a hampered product. But it is still better than no offline access whatsoever.
Welcome to the cloud!
Grr.
I’m synching my work mail with Google calendar. It’s awesome, and I never thought Google would find its way through our annoying IT safeguards. I now almost never use Microsoft at home. It’s Google everything. If Google crashes so do I.
Google Calendar offers many ways to create and share content other than the web interface that we all know and love.
If Yahoo put such a shitty product out you wouldn’t shut up about how it’s the end of time.
Seriously, your fanboyism is the source of your crappy ‘reporting’.
That’s still OK. If Microsoft would have made the smallest of mistake in their calendar availability in hotmail/outlook, these guys would shout their throat out and let the whole world know.
Google produces any kind of crap and some people here take it. Why?
What the world doesnt get is that Google will it a software wall with their offline. You can’t have features X,Y,Z in the cloud for use offline unless, you have all those same features offline. i.e. total parity between online/offline.
This doesnt even get into data synchronization, conflict resolution etc.
Disclosure: I own a part of ScheduleWorld.
ScheduleWorld has been providing full read/write offline access to calendar/contacts/tasks/notes for a long time. ScheduleWorld doesn’t need Google gears either; it works fine with plain Firefox 3 or (slower) IE 6+ with Flash (Flash handles the offline storage cache in IE).
You can create/edit/delete items offline and when you connect to the net again it will all sync up just like a desktop app.
IMHO all web applications should work like this.
Cheers.
“In January, Google released an offline version of Gmail based on Google Gears.”
Unless you use 64-bit Linux that is. Despite releasing Gears many months ago, 64-bit Linux users are still being ignored by Google.
So much for supporting one of your most important base of evangelist users.
Shame Google, shame.