[nex3]

(Offline Gmail team member here)

One thing we learned early on was that making any existing system (especially one as big as Gmail) work offline had some very difficult, fundamental issues. The biggest of these is that everything that normally happens server-side must also be able to happen client-side when there's no network connection.

This is a problem not only because there is a lot of server-side complexity in Gmail, but also because it changes all the time. New features are added, old behavior is changed, and if the offline code path isn't changed along with it, things have a tendency to break horribly. The only solutions to this involve having every Gmail engineer modify the offline code path whenever they touch the online, which is a large burden that we weren't willing to lay on them.

[anigbrowl]

As a tablet user, I actually like this; when I got a honeycomb tablet, I realized I had come to miss the split-screen view after several years of using Gmail...not that I want it to turn in gOutlook, but there are definite advantages.

On the negative side, it's very weak that there are no formatting controls in this version. I miss them on the tablet side already, which means that messages sent from that device necessarily have a different signature from those sent from my desktop. It's not necessary or even desirable for mail recipients to know I was using one device or another. Some people like to signal that they are on the go with 'sent from my phone' or the like, but I would rather have some basic editing functionality, and this would not be hard to add. On a tablet it's annoying, on the desktop or a laptop where I might need to work offline it's unforgivable. On the up side, this is a good starting point for building an editing/configuration interface that could find its way back towards the tablet space. With wide-format screens the norm nowadays, I was struck by how much more pleasant the panel experience was on my desktop monitor and could see myself switching to this from the page+widgets approach of existing gMail, which is beginning to feel very long in the tooth.

This goes double for Google Docs, although it's slightly off-topic. I like working on my tablet a great deal and find I can type surprisingly fast even with the on-screen keyboard as opposed to an external one. But Google Docs on a tablet is so unusable that every manufacturer ships with some open-source office suite to make up for the deficiency. since Android does not have the same mind/market share as iOS/iPad, Google needs to offer compelling software alternatives. In many respects it already does so; but productivity tools are noticeable by their absence or abridgement. A minimally-capable version of Google Docs made sense on a smartphone, but on a full-size tablet it's absurdly self-defeating, and inimical to a corporate or academic environment. I would pay for a 'power user' tablet version of core apps like gMail and gDocs. The fact that there is no easy way to leverage forms into an Android clipboard/data-entry interface is a major missed opportunity.

This really needs to see some movement in tandem with the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich launch. I know both Docs and Android are outside of your remit, but hope you could circulate these concerns in the cafeteria, so to speak. I mention this here because *@gmail.com is increasingly acceptable as a professional address, but this will only last so long as the tools cater to the needs of professionals.

[blub]

I think the difficulty is that none of the technologies that you are using were designed for building software applications, but for showing text and images on a screen.

In other words, there is a perfectly fine solution for offline G-mail, it's called "e-mail client".

[_urga]

Actually the problem may be that OS user interfaces, for all their native functionality, have not kept pace with browsers at showing text and images on a screen. Hypertext is an innovation that is hard to ignore.

[blub]

Native UI is vastly more powerful compared to HTML and CSS, which were designed to display web pages, not widgets and controls.

In fact I don't understand what kind of experience you have to say something like that. If you were a web designer you would know that the web UI is a painful to use hack. If you were a mobile/desktop developmer you would know that both types of UIs are better at showing pretty much anything on a screen - including a browser engine.

[MatthewPhillips]

Thanks for your response. I take this to mean that Gmail is undergoing a complete re-write. Is that correct?

[nex3]

I can't comment on unannounced engineering efforts, and I certainly didn't mean to imply anything about them.

All I can really say is that if they wanted the primary Gmail client to support offline, then it's my personal opinion that the only tenable way to do that is by having a single code path. Whether there are plans to actually do this I don't know and couldn't talk about if I did.