Flour Power

After being involved with computers and the web for quite a few years now, I hardly ever get too excited about new products that are said to be completely innovative and capable of changing the way we'll do things from now on. That's because they end up being just small improvements to what we already have been using. And now Google Wave is approaching...

On the 2nd day of the Google I/O Developer Conference, Lars and Jens Rasmussen (the creators of Google Maps) unveiled what they've been working since 2007, after asking themselves the question "What would email look like if we set out to invent it today?". The result is Google Wave, which could be described as something that mixes the functionality of email, instant messaging, social networking, wikis and blogging (and I might have forgotten something...) into one single protocol. Sounds confusing and messy? Well, it isn't, and that's the beauty of it: it just makes so much sense! Just watch the demo to see everything in action. It's a bit long, but well worth it:

Impressed? I know I am, and I just wish we could start using it right now! The question on my mind now is how this will tie with email, because we can't expect everyone in the world to immediately dump it to start using Wave.

To make it even better, Wave won't be just another Google product. It's also a protocol and a platform:

The Google Wave product is the web application people will use to access and edit waves. It's an HTML 5 app, built on Google Web Toolkit. It includes a rich text editor and other functions like desktop drag-and-drop (which, for example, lets you drag a set of photos right into a wave).
Google Wave can also be considered a platform with a rich set of open APIs that allow developers to embed waves in other web services, and to build new extensions that work inside waves.
The Google Wave protocol is the underlying format for storing and the means of sharing waves, and includes the "live" concurrency control, which allows edits to be reflected instantly across users and services. The protocol is designed for open federation, such that anyone's Wave services can interoperate with each other and with the Google Wave service. To encourage adoption of the protocol, we intend to open source the code behind Google Wave.

And now all we can do is wait...

For more information:
Google Wave - The product home page, and where you can sign up to be notified when it becomes available.
Google Wave API - The API, documentation and code samples.
Google Wave Federation Protocol - The protocol, whitepapers and discussion forum.

The guys at Gmail have been busy lately, and just a few days after releasing offline support for Gmail, here comes another feature - Multiple Inboxes.

The name might be a bit misleading, since what this feature really does is providing a way to have multiple views of your email available at the same time and without having to open another browser window/tab.

Multiple Inboxes is available as an option in Gmail labs. Just go to Settings -> Labs and enable it. You'll then get a new "Multiple Inboxes" tab in the Settings, where you can set up what "inboxes" you want to appear in Gmail next to the regular mail. The way to specify the contents of each "inbox" is by using Gmail's advanced search operators. It's also possible to change how many results show up in each "inbox" and the position of the new tabs: above, below or to the right of the regular Inbox.

It's a handy feature for those of us who like to keep the Inbox tidy and just filter most email so that it gets labelled and archived on arrival, and then have to click through all the labels to read it.

It took some time, but the Google folks finally did it. It is now possible to use Gmail while offline:

Today we're starting to roll out an experimental feature in Gmail Labs that should help fill in those gaps: offline Gmail. So even if you're offline, you can open your web browser, go to gmail.com, and get to your mail just like you're used to.

Offline Gmail uses Gears to download a local cache of the mail and as long as there's an active Internet connection, that cache is synchronized with Gmail's servers. When the connection is lost, Gmail automatically switches to offline mode, and uses the data stored locally instead of sending/fetching it across the network. It's possible to access almost all of Gmail's features while offline, and those will be automatically synchronized with Gmail's servers when there's an Internet connection available. There are some features missing, though: it's not possible to add attachments, the contact manager is not available offline, and it's not possible to customize which messages to download. Gmail uses some algorithms to determine which messages to cache locally: in my case it downloaded 3 months of email (some labels were downloaded completely, while Spam and Trash were ignored), including attachments, which amounted to about 280MB.

This should come in handy for those that rely a lot on email but can't be connected all the time. It's now possible to get some inbox cleaning done while commuting, or on an airplane. And as the Gmail team point out, it's a good solution for those with crappy connections:

And if you're on an unreliable or slow connection (like when you're "borrowing" your neighbor's wireless), you can choose to use "flaky connection mode," which is somewhere in between: it uses the local cache as if you were disconnected, but still synchronizes your mail with the server in the background.

The setup couldn't be easier. Just go to Settings > Labs, enable it (you'll have to install Gears if you don't have it yet.) and after the browser is reloaded press the "Offline" link on the top right menu. It will take some time downloading everything, though.