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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:

• Power - you'll be sometimes connected (to the power socket) and sometimes not. Wouldn't it be nice if my web applications (heavy animations?!?) knew this and could react appropriately. "Hey man, don't open this Java applet as it's going to drain the battery."
• Connectivity - you're not either online or not. It's a spectrum. You're sometimes connected, but slowly. Wouldn't it be nice if my web application would automatically adjust download resolution depending on my connectivity speed? (through a proxy, say)

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 (5)

July 24, 2007 10:57 PM PDT Jason Zhu (Intel)

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.

July 27, 2007 2:55 PM PDT Jon Mountjoy

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.

August 9, 2007 12:04 PM PDT Brad Neuberg

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

August 9, 2007 12:07 PM PDT Brad Neuberg

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

August 10, 2007 10:09 AM PDT Jon Mountjoy

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: http://cache-http://www.intel.com/cd/00/00/33/64/336428_336428.pdf. Perhaps you'd consider some integration with Dojo?

Trackbacks (2)

• Intel® Software Network Blogs » Blog Archive » Mobile Developer Community Update with New Mobile Platform SDK 1.2 release
  July 30, 2007 10:12 AM PDT
• Intel® Software Network Blogs » Blog Archive » SyncServer is consuming valuable network resources
  August 13, 2007 11:50 AM PDT

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