Cheers

Thank you.

The online / offline world is a really interesting space right now and is in my opinion the next frontier and certainly here to stay.

The most interesting thing about the “offline” concept is the actual meaning of offline and how it can be used as there turns out to be a handful of different models each with a varying degrees of “offlineness”.

At one end of the spectrum are the always-offline apps. These are a special class of single-page browser-based applications that only work in an offline manner. My favourite application in this space is TiddlyWiki (http://www.tiddlywiki.com/). Its an editable wiki but the data file is stored on your local machine only and doesn’t use the network at all. I use one of these to store blog ideas.

Next there are a class online apps, but with an offline tolerance. They are built so that if you lose your connection temporarily, like you go through a tunnel, they can basically still operate and will sync back to the server when your connection is restored.

Then there are the class of apps that offer formal support for an “offline mode”. This is the main class of applications under the offline banner and now with HTML5 this category will grow rapidly. Typically not all the regular features are available, mostly because its just hard to do and they don’t all make sense when not connected.

There are also a bunch of apps in between these models that use local browser-based storage to either allow for some partial offline capability, device specific storage (like where you are up to in a video playback) or local data cache so that when you do launch your browser-based app next time it can start instantly (by viewing the local data) before it connects and refreshes from the server.

Evernote (http://www.evernote.com/) did a bit of this in their iPhone app when they kept a copy of all notes locally so you could browse your notes, even if you were not online which was a hugely popular feature request.

Speaking of phones, the applications in the iTunes App Store are a great example of the evolution of this space as they are a complete mix of offline, hybrid, and online-only. Some run entirely offline, like the drawing programs. Some run mostly offline with an occasional and optional online component. Many games fall into this category, for example Angry Birds, which you are free to play in a full offline way, but then can go online if you want to submit your high-scores to the global leader board. And many are of course are online-only apps such as YouTube, Weather, News and Stocks.

Google Gears is no longer as you point out, but it was actually never meant to be. They always knew it was only there to fill the gap until the standards-based solutions caught up. Gmail and Google Docs have now been re-written to use the built-in HTML5 mechanisms that Google have now implemented in Chrome, which is obviously a much better way to go.

With so many models, and a whole swag on new technologies, we are only beginning to explore how to best take advantage of this new space and I predict we’ll be seeing a big expansion in approaches before we start to hone in on a common approach.

Our users here at MYOB are telling us that offline is an important part of how they like to work, so we are certainly taking that into account in our product plans.

I assume you do realise that Google stopped development on Gears way back in 2010. Today, they announced that Gears would cease working permanently on December the 1st, 2011. ( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/more-spring-cleaning-out-of-season.html )

How can you convince us that your software is not trapped in some prehistoric state and your move towards the cloud is just too slow and ill-thoughtout? – people seem to be explicitly abandoning a hybrid model?

I think “cloud” has moved past being a buzz word – my 82 year old mother asked me about “the cloud” the other day – her volunteer organisation was considering moving to using Skype for phone conferences in a bid to lower costs.

She’ll be starting a Linked In group soon and Tweeting about their successes !