So, thanks to the drivel you read here, I got offered a sort of gig to write a few pieces for the Hindustan Times’ Mumbai Supplement called ‘HT Café’ and I took them up on the offer. The first piece came out today and I’d have linked to it but HT’s online version (or epaper) requires a (free) user account to view. I know most people can’t be bothered to go through the hassle of setting this up (I wouldn’t) so I’m posting the article right here, after the jump. To the powers at HT please get with the program and remove the login requirements for your epaper. Even The Times of India dropped their login for the epaper sometime last year. Imagine that!  Welcome to the year Two Thousand and Nine.

The piece I wrote was about Gmail Offline, a new Google labs feature available in your Gmail account. The article is refreshingly free of cuss words and snarky euphemisms (mostly) for those who’s fragile sensibilities are offended by such stuff. If HT’s readers like the piece (and more importantly, if HT ‘shows me the money!’ I’ll probably do this occasionally) Read on..

 Gmail: ‘Offline’ is the new Online?

Last week saw the debut of Gmail ‘Offline’, a new feature from the ‘NOT EVIL’ folks at Google.(Google’s well publicised corporate slogan is ‘Don’t Be Evil’.) Read on to find out how ‘Offline’ is going to change the way a whole generation of people use email and how you can get the most out of it.

First things first. What is Gmail Offline?

It is an experimental new feature in Gmail that lets you compose messages and read old mail even if you don’t have access to the internet, like when you are on a plane, or if you are like me, when you can’t find an open wifi network and are too cheap to pay for access to a closed network.(Don’t smirk. I work in the media industry.)

So basically, with this feature enabled, you can log in to your gmail account from your web browser, while offline, view mail that you have sent and received and compose new mails to send later. Let me add once again, you can do all of this without a connection to the internet. Truly mind-bending stuff from the folks at Google then. 

Not so fast. The setup.

Before you go yanking that LAN cable out of your ethernet jack, there are a few steps you have to go through to setup Gmail Offline.

The simplest way to do this is to use Google’s own browser which is spectacularly fast and much more secure than Microsoft’s own ‘Internet Exploder’. It’s called Google Chrome and even if you aren’t interested in Gmail Offline you should definitely download Chrome right this minute and never, ever use IE again. Do it now. 

Get Google chrome here: www.google.com/chrome

Done? Now delete that shortcut icon for Internet Explorer from your desktop. You can thank me later.

1. Start Chrome and go to Gmail.
2. Log into your Gmail account.
3. Click on the ‘Settings’ link in the top right corner of the window.
4. Under Settings look for a heading call ‘Labs’ and click on it.
5. The first feature in the list should be Offline by the Offline Team’. Click to enable it. Click to save changes. (If you aren’t using Chrome a dialog box will pop up asking you to if you would like to install ‘Google Gears’. Google Gears is a tiny, safe program that enables Google Offline. Install ‘Google Gears’.)
6. Next you should get a dialog box asking you if you want to allow Google to store data locally on your computer.
7. You should see a tiny green logo in the top right hand corner of you Gmail window and when you click on it you should get a status messages like this.
8. You are done. The little green logo with the arrows should look like a check mark now.
9. From now on whenever you log in to your Gmail account you should see the little green check mark in the top right corner and when you click on it you should see the status message to the right.
10. Now disconnect from the internet (turn of your wifi and disconnect and LAN cables from your computer) and try to log into Gmail. You should be able to login and view mails and even compose new emails just like normal. The only difference should be that the little green check mark is replaced by an unavailable sign. When you click on it you should get a message similar to this. Any mails you compose will be stored on your computer till an internet connection is detected and will only be sent the next time Gmail syncs.

Caveats Galore! The Fine Print.

1. Let me turn the usual warning on it’s head. DO TRY THIS AT HOME. i.e. If you want to use Gmail Offline please make sure it is working for you at home or wherever you have an internet connection. First do a dry run by disconnecting from the network temporarily and see if you are being able to log in and access your email. You definitely don’t want to find out that you didn’t configure it correctly when you are thirty thousand feet up in the air with some smelly, fat guy snoring next you or when you are in a hotel room where internet access costs as much as the black market rate for one of your kidneys.
2. Smart as they are, the boffins at Google haven’t been able to defy the basic laws of the internet. You can compose mails but they will obviously be sent only the next time you have a connection to the internet. So if you need to send an urgent email you can compose it but it will just sit there in your outbox silently mocking you till you next connect to the internet. Rule of thumb: If your subject line is something like “Emergency All Hands Meeting! 2:50 PM” you probably don’t want to rely on Gmail Offline.
3. Currently you only get access to a month of old mails though that should be good enough for about my 97.3 % of people out there. (My utterly scientific percentage guesstimate). But if the mail you want to refer to isn’t available, well then it just isn’t. You’re out of luck.
4. Despite the fact that almost every man, woman and child has a Gmail account, Gmail is still in Beta. So this new feature is an experimental feature on top of a service that is in Beta. That means it WILL crash every now and then. When I was trying to enable Gmail offline my browser crashed twice and Gmail itself behaved quite funky while my messages where being downloaded in the background. Your mileage may vary but you really ought to do this in Google’s own Chrome browser as it will make things much simpler. Honestly, save yourself a lot of trouble, get Chrome. If you are on Mac OS X like me, Safari is your best bet.
5. Privacy has always an issue with Gmail. With this new feature the privacy-nuts are definitely going to raise a stink soon because now your emails are stored on the computer and how long is it going to be before some smart teenager in a basement figures out a way to read them? Your guess is as good as mine. You have been warned.

Finally. this is NOT a replacement for a proper desktop mail program like Outlook Express on Windows or Mail.app on the Mac. For people who need access to every single email that they have ever sent or received, a proper mail client program is still the way to go. Gmail Offline is limited by the fact that it has to run in a web browser and it only downloads a month of emails. So think of this more as a something you would use on a second computer or laptop while away from home. 

If you understand the terms POP mail or IMAP, GMail Offline is not for you.This more as a step forward for people who normally use web-mail quite happily and hate email programs.

The Bigger Picture.

For people who are interested in these kinds of trends Gmail Offline is yet another piece in the puzzle that is Google’s plan at the mythical Cloud OS. A computing device where almost everything you do happens in a web browser. You have very few dedicated applications and the operating system you are running doesn’t matter a whole lot.

Google has previously introduced features like Google Docs and Google Calendar that are in direct competition to Microsoft’s expensive office suite of applications. I’m guessing that this feature is going to be more of ‘killer app’ for the simple reason that mail is one of the foremost activities online today and absolutely everyone has a Gmail account.

Also unlike people from my generation who were frustrated by the bugginess and lack of speed of early web-based email services such as Hotmail, kids these days (I love saying that) have grown up with Google and Facebook and are totally comfortable with doing everything in a browser window. 

As you can imagine, Microsoft hates the idea of being sidelined liked this and its handsome CEO, Steve Ballmer (seen here with his game-face on) has famously vowed to ‘Kill Google’. Microsoft is also making an effort to move its applications online with its ‘Windows Live’ service but in typical MS fashion its efforts are half-baked, lame and generally unusable till three years after their release date.

Apple is also making a play for online apps with its MobileMe service and iWork.com but despite the success of the iPod and the iPhone the California based company is still a bit player in the computer industry with its single figure market share.

So the big fight is between Microsoft and Google and the next round starts now.

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