How To Install Offline Google Mail

Today Google announced that Google Mail, Google Calendar and Google Docs will be available as offline web apps. Offline Google Mail is available now in the Chrome Web Store. This means that you will be able to read, organise and write emails while without an internet connection. Awesome!

The Offline Google Mail interface!

Make sure you have the three main requisites for this "How To":

1. A working computer with an active internet connection
2. Google Chrome or Chromium web browser
3. A Google Mail account...

Here's how to install Offline Google Mail in a few easy steps:


Go to the Offline Google Mail Chrome Web Store page. You can use this link to do that.

You will be asked confirmation to install Offline Google Mail. Go ahead and click "Install"

Once the Chrome app has installed, you can run it from your Chrome new tab screen.

When you do that you will be asked for confirmation to allow offline mail.

Go ahead and tick the box next to "Allow Offline Mail" and then click the blue "Continue" button.

And that's it! You should then have access to your GMail when offline and the funky new UI!

Thanks to Google and the GMail team! I think this is a great new improvement to their services!

As usual, feel free to leave comments and/or questions. You can Google +1 this post too.

Joli OS' Teaser

I was browsing through my feeds in Joli OS earlier and I came across what to me seems like a teaser on the official Joli OS Blog.

In the blog post entitled "Some News About Joli OS" dated July 19th 2011 the opening is quite a teaser:

"It’s been a while since you’ve had an update from us but we’ve been working hard on something big. We will tell you a bit about that very soon! In the meantime, we have some updates for you on Joli OS."

The blog post then goes on to list the updates that are currently being pushed to the Joli OS local and web apps.

The post is then closed by another teaser:

Stay tuned… More coming soon!

Could this be a teaser to Jolicloud 1.3? Or maybe even a shift in platform from the older Ubuntu Netbook base to a Chromium OS base? Tariq has never been shy of praising Chrome and the Chromium and Jolicloud is available as a web app in the Chrome Web Store. This is pure conjecture on my part. I am excited, and  look forward to seeing what happens "soon"!

What is Google Chrome OS?

Google Chrome OS is a Linux-based operating system designed by Google to work exclusively with web applications. This means that when you turn it on you don't boot into a traditional operating system like Microsoft Windows or Ubuntu, you boot into Chrome OS.

The best way to explain this is how Google have done so in this video:

Even on a three year old netbook Chrome OS boots up in less than 15 seconds. It's fantastic.

Feel free to leave comments and/or questions, any feedback is appreciated.

Freelish.us - Federated Soial Bookmarks

Yesterday I signed up to a service that I thought was Evan Prodromou's April Fool for 2011. From a link on Identi.ca I read Evan's blog post about a federated social bookmarking service he was launching called Freelish.us. Think of it as the Identi.ca of Digg.com/Delicio.us. 

In Evan's words:

"Today, we're launching a new site [...]. Freelish.us is a social bookmarking service, similar to dozens of other similar services. It lets users store URLs – bookmarks – with tags to make them easy to organize and share. You can subscribe to other users' bookmarks and get a stream of interesting things to read in your inbox."

The reason I thought Freelish.us was an April Fool was the look and feel of the site. The logo and UI are very lilac (very, very lilac...), and it was so similar to Identi.ca (apart from the lack of character limit in posts and the "bookmarklet tool")

Freelish.us is very, very lilac.

The Bookmarklet Tool is a bookmark which is java code that runs in your browser and gives you the possibility to pass the webpage you are browsing to Freelish.us. In Firefox 4 it is all good: you drag the link to the bookmark bar and you get your button to pass pages to Freelish.us. Sadly I use Chrome/Chromium on smaller screens (netbooks/laptop) so I don't have a bookmark bar. The bookmarklet tool doesn't work for me at the moment, but I'm hoping some enthusiastic individual makes a Chrome/Chromium extension for this soon. Once that is in place I'll be all in on Freelish.us.

At the time of writing this post Freelish.us is a bit like departure lounges at Edinburgh airport at 4 am: there are hardly any people there, who would like to get going but there are no flights, no shops or cafes open and almost no other people to speak to.

I believe this service could take off and be a great success, especially if the API is usable in clients like Seesmic on mobile devices and more people get on board. Having said that, I'll go and convince Candice to sign up now...