offlining

The laws of nature indicate that if there's no Internet connection, you can't watch streaming videos. Roadshow for iPad defies that law, downloading videos to your tablet for offline viewing.

This is exactly as awesome as it sounds--though let's get the bad news out of the way right now: Roadshow doesn't support YouTube (owing to Apple's App Store restrictions). So much for saving all your favorite cute kitten videos.

You can, however, pilfer clips from other sources, including CollegeHumor, Funny or Die, The Onion, and TED Talks. In fact, all four of these sites are … Read more

One of the big criticisms of Google's Chromebooks is that they're significantly less useful when you don't have an Internet connection or are paying by the megabyte for a wireless data plan. That drawback is particularly glaring when it comes to Google Docs.

And unfortunately for Google, the company missed the Chrome OS launch window with one important upgrade coming to Google Docs, the ability to use the word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation software while not connected to the Net.

Offline Google Docs was slated to arrive early this year, but Google pushed it back. In May, … Read more

Netflix, the Web's top video rental service but one with a history of suffering outages, saw another multihour blackout last night.

The site seems to have gone down for about three or four hours last night, according to reports from those posting to Twitter. Netflix is traditionally tight-lipped about the causes of its malfunctions and this time is no exception.

"Good morning," wrote Steve Swasey, Netflix's spokesman. "It was a technical issue that we fixed."

The good news is that Netflix wasn't taken out by marauding hackers. Sony, Sega, and a number of … Read more

Google has shut down the ability to use Gmail with Chrome while not connected to the network, the last vestige of an older approach to offline Google Apps and Google Docs that the company is replacing.

To enable the offline feature, Google had been using a browser plug-in called Gears that could store data on a person's computer then sync with the Gmail server once a connection was re-established. Google phased out Gears, though, and yesterday was the last day offline Gmail worked with Chrome, which had Gears built in.

"As we move the Gmail Offline capability to … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Somewhat later than had been planned last year, Google is addressing a significant weaknesses of Google Docs and Google Apps: the inability to use the services while not connected to the Net.

"We will make them [Google Docs offline apps] available this summer," said Sundar Pichai, senior vice president of Chrome, in an interview here last week at at the Google I/O conference. "We've all been using it internally. It's imminent. We want to make sure they're good."

It's not clear just how high the demand for the feature is. … Read more

Google is betting on a future with ubiquitous, affordable, wireless, high-speed Internet access. That may be smart in the long run, but last week that philosophy drove me straight back into the arms of Microsoft.

My technology choices generally come down to pragmatic rather than religious choices, and it was pragmatism that led me to embrace Google Docs last year. I like the fact that I can work simultaneously on multiple computers--indeed, even on mobile phones these days--and that multiple people can easily collaborate. My requirements for advanced formatting and formulas are low enough that I generally can put up … Read more

Web Snapper is an app and Safari plug-in that provides a fast and flexible way to capture screenshots of web pages. The Mac OS provides some very limited screen-capture capabilities with Grab, but Web Snapper provides many more options (especially in terms of format, and in its easy-to-use integration with Safari), and it can capture multi-page vector PDFs with actual text, links, and styling intact.

Web Snapper gives you a few different options for your interface, which will likely vary based on your workflow and browser preference. Using any browser, you can drag and drop URLs onto Web Snapper's … Read more

Web Snapper is an app and Safari plug-in that provides a fast and flexible way to capture screenshots of Web pages. The Mac OS provides some very limited screen-capture capabilities with Grab, but Web Snapper provides many more options (especially in terms of format, and in its easy-to-use integration with Safari), and it can capture multipage vector PDFs with actual text, links, and styling intact.

Web Snapper gives you a few different options for your interface, which will likely vary based on your workflow and browser preference. Using any browser, you can drag and drop URLs onto Web Snapper's … Read more

An attempt to endow Web-based applications with a means of storing data on the browser's computer is at an end--at least as far as standardizing the technology is concerned.

The technology, called Web SQL Database, built the SQLite database into the browser, letting programmers use the common SQL technology to read and write data. That's useful for a variety of things, but the most notable probably is caching information so it can be retrieved when a computer isn't connected to the network. That's a big problem for many Web apps today.

But yesterday, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) … Read more