So, I went to Google IO today and will go again tomorrow. The code lab I went to today showed how to use Google Gears some. Then I figured, hrmmm, how could I use this for browsing Mohtalim offline? Then I searched to see if someone already did it and of course someone did. Here's what I found:
http://www.phpied.com/category/google-gears/
It's a more generic way of just saving all the content linked off of the current page. I don't think it's as smart as a special purpose add-on for phpBB might be though because it doesn't know that a topic hasn't been updated or not. It's also a bit annoying since it keeps adding a line at the bottom of the page for every link it visits.
Save AnyThing (using Google Gears)
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quantus
- Tenth Dan Procrastinator
- Posts: 4891
- Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2003 3:09 am
- Location: San Jose, CA
Re: Save AnyThing
I find that using the Save AnyThing implementation is a bit more trouble than it's worth. The best way for it to work would be to load the cache and then replace the content with live content if available. With Save Anything you alway use the cached data unless you remove the cached data, which makes it less than transparent and even quite annoying.
I don't think a lot of people understand how to use gears well yet. Based on one talk today, the move to offline apps is a bit bumpy when trying to offer all/most of the same important functionality. Let's take for example spell checking. It makes little sense to use gears to store an entire dictionary, especially in 50+ languages just to be able to take it offline. However, this would make the app more responsive because it wouldn't have to wait for a network transaction in order to run spell check. Also, there's no encryption, so when apps try to keep passwords stored locally, they're likely in plain text in the SQLite database. One financial app switched to using shared key encryption to get around this issue so that only the app server could decrypt the password, but this needs to become standard practice in the future. Even the detection of offline versus online is not automatic currently. Most apps require the user to actively click a "go offline" link. I did ask about this behavior of one of the devs presenting and he said that it is only temporary for their app and that it will become automatic. Still, I worry for all those other apps out there and how long it will take them to be as seemless.
I don't think a lot of people understand how to use gears well yet. Based on one talk today, the move to offline apps is a bit bumpy when trying to offer all/most of the same important functionality. Let's take for example spell checking. It makes little sense to use gears to store an entire dictionary, especially in 50+ languages just to be able to take it offline. However, this would make the app more responsive because it wouldn't have to wait for a network transaction in order to run spell check. Also, there's no encryption, so when apps try to keep passwords stored locally, they're likely in plain text in the SQLite database. One financial app switched to using shared key encryption to get around this issue so that only the app server could decrypt the password, but this needs to become standard practice in the future. Even the detection of offline versus online is not automatic currently. Most apps require the user to actively click a "go offline" link. I did ask about this behavior of one of the devs presenting and he said that it is only temporary for their app and that it will become automatic. Still, I worry for all those other apps out there and how long it will take them to be as seemless.