Without doubt more and more people are turning to online applications for the convenience it provides. But more and more people are also becoming frustrated when they lose their internet connection.

It’s all very well me having gMail available wherever I am, but if my connection dies I have to stop emailing. This shouldn’t be the case. A connection problem should still allow me access to my mail and allow me to send it. Sure my outgoing mail may be put in a local queue until the connection is restored, but most the time I don’t need to know about that. Apart from a little icon in the corner of my window saying Gmail is not connected, I should not notice any difference when on- or offline.

This is how I would like my gMail account to work:

I click on my Gmail icon on my desktop or type the address in my web browser.

My computer tries to connect to the gMail server. If I’m online, it compares the latest application version with the version stored on my computer. If gMail doesn’t exist on my computer, it will download it straight from the internet just like it does now. If my offline version is out-of-date, it will also download it off of the internet and the local version will be updated. If my version is up-to-date, it just loads from my hard drive. And, of course, if there is no connection at all, it will load from my hard drive.

The only time I should ever see a connection error is if I’ve never used email on this computer and I have no Internet connection.

A similar process happens for my email. When there is a connection, gMail updates my email and downloads it to my computer. When there is no connection I just continue reading unaware that I’m offline.

GMail should be simple because it already works on the web. Taking something more complex like Photoshop would be much more difficult but also perfectly possible.

Photoshop would work something like this:

Presume I’m on a computer that has never accessed Photoshop before.

I type Photoshop.app into the web browser.

A password box asks me for my Photoshop password to make sure I’ve paid to use it.

Photoshop checks to see whether there is a version offline. If so, it loads it.

Because of the size of the software this is done in modules. Anything out-of-date gets updated in the background, but only the out-of-date parts of the software get updated.

If no version is available offline it runs the front end from the web while surrounding modules download in the background.

Obviously breaking it into module is a lot more complex than gMail is, but it is perfectly doable. Photoshop may be a long way off, but gMail is only a step or two away.

The point of this will be that software isn’t installed by the user, it just runs. It may be slow at first, but it soon speeds up. You buy software (or discover free stuff) and it’s available on any computer with an Internet connection and appropriate hardware. (Provisions could be made to check USB sticks also, so a connection wouldn’t always be necessary).

And yes, this could also include operating systems.

Best of both worlds, and for the user off- and online are ostensibly the same.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 4th, 2006 at 16:16 UTC and is filed under Futurology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.