Connectivity is only part of the user experience

By Jon Mountjoy (8 posts) on July 23, 2007 at 5:14 pm

There's an awful lot of interest in Google Gears right now (proving offline support for web applications), and rightly so. Other frameworks are jumping on the bandwagon too. Dojo can now utilize Gears, Adobe's ApolloAIR, and from Scoble's blog, a host of others will soon be supported too. The motivating factor behind the technology is: Hey, I'm not always connected, so let me download and cache the data I'll probably want to access so that I can navigate the web while offline. The motivation behind this is really: I'm not always online. And surely, the motivation behind that is: I'm mobile. And if you're mobile, you're probably not lugging around a desktop - you're more than likely on a laptop. This all begs the question: Surely there are more aspects to being "mobile" than "online"? And of course there are:

Now imagine the mashups. You're in a dodgy coffee shop on a dodgy internet connection browsing a (dodgy?) site, and when you click a download you get your browser rendering a nice little warning: You don't have enough power to download this huge file given your current connectivity! Now that is Google Gears on steroids... I wonder if the Google Gears, Adobe Apollo and all the rest know about Intel's Web 2.0 TDK that lets you interrogate your machine to do all this...

Categories: Mobility

Comments (8) Comments RSS Feed

By Jason Zhu on July 24th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Hi Jon, agree with you.
I have used Google Gears together with Google Reader, the offline capability is cool which allow me read my subscriptions even on the go. But I still need to tell the application whether I am on or off the network.
I expect those Internet applications able to auto detect the connectivity status of client machine and auto switch online or offline to accessing and showing the contents.
Furthermore, while I try to download a big size video file, the application can tell me whether I will be able to get the whole fine with limited connection bandwidth or battery life. Intel web 2.0 TDK is a good tools for those web application developers, and we have just launched new open source version of Intel Mobile Platform SDK 1.2 on ISN mobile developer community.

By Jon Mountjoy on July 27th, 2007 at 1:55 pm
Hi Jason - yeah, but you can't do that because of the way Google Reader is currently engineered you *need* to know before you go offline as that is when you download all the relevant information for offline viewing. I think what you want is a reengineered Google Reader where they synchronize continuously, not just at offline time.

By Intel® Software Network Blogs » Blog Archive » Mobile Developer Community Update with New Mobile Platform SDK 1.2 release on July 30th, 2007 at 9:12 am
[...] In this week, we have released open source project of Intel Mobile Platform SDK 1.2, we participated in the OScon 2007 in Portland, met with many developers to discuss about this new Intel software tools for creating mobile aware applications(eg. Connectivity, Power, Bandwidth). We've just created a new home for the MPSDK here on ISN, with links to articles, the source code and more. Check it out. There was a talk about Google Gears as open source project for creating offline web applications, which could be a perfect complementary that Intel Mobile Platform SDK 1.2 helps detect the network stat and Google Gears helps do the offline capability implementation. You can see the discussion at Jon's Blog - Connectivity is only part of the user experience. [...]

By Intel® Software Network Blogs on July 30th, 2007 at 4:28 pm
links from Technoratifor creating offline web applications, which could be a perfect complementary that Intel Mobile Platform SDK 1.2 helps detect the network stat and Google Gears helps do the offline capability implementation. You can see the discussion at Jon's Blog -Connectivity is only part of the user experience. Tools & Codes: Based on the feedback from the community, Rich Winterton has updated and released Intel Performance Power Monitor Gadget v1.1 for Google Desktop, which supports new windows XP OSs, shows how Intel Speedstep Technology works to

By Brad Neuberg on August 9th, 2007 at 11:04 am
Quick note; Dojo Offline hasn't jumped on the bandwagon. I've been pursuing the offline web challenge for the last 2 1/2 years, first with AMASS, Dojo Storage, and then Dojo Offline. If that's a bandwagon it's a pretty slow one ;)

Best,
Brad Neuberg

By Brad Neuberg on August 9th, 2007 at 11:07 am
BTW, I do know about Intel's excellent work in the offline space. I studied the work Intel did in the early 2000's around Occasionally Connected Computing, as well as the Web SDK you pointed to above. I found the Web SDK interesting in that it tries to address dynamically adjusting to all sorts of concerns. It would need to be hooked into web browsers exposing a JavaScript API of some kind to be useful to web apps however.

Best,
Brad Neuberg

By Jon Mountjoy on August 10th, 2007 at 9:09 am
Hey Brad - Yep, Dojo seems to have been ahead of the curve on offline. The bandwagon I'm referring to is that of Google Gears - ie. Dojo jumping on the bandwagon of those others use it for storage.

The web 2.0 TDK does expose a JavaScript API. The API is here. Perhaps you'd consider some integration with Dojo?

By Intel® Software Network Blogs » Blog Archive » SyncServer is consuming valuable network resources on August 13th, 2007 at 10:50 am
[...] a coffee shop yesterday, on a slow modem line (via my mobile phone). Having recently written about connectivity and power, I thought I'd investigate why my shiny MacBook Pro was so slow at accessing the [...]


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