Ajax Girl

The arguments around offline have been brewing for some time. DHH came out with typical flare on why offline doesn’t matter as you are either online all the time, or if you aren’t, you don’t mind it.

I hope that offline matters less and less over time, but for me connectivity can be very spotty indeed. It isn’t just when you are on a plane. EVDO and friends often suck. Wireless often sucks. Hell, if they can’t fix it so my calls don’t drop all the time then how can I expect decent net access from anywhere? And all of this is from someone living in the bay area, let alone Lonely, Wyoming, or somewhere in the third world (yes they have internet too!)

The folks at Cerulean Studios (makers of Trillian IM) have blogged about their offline IM client that is Flash based, but can jump offline.

The current focus of the technology is to rip application-quality web software *out* of the browser and *on* to the desktop. It is (currently) technically impossible (for security reasons, at the very least) to magically invoke a real application on your desktop without a download of any sorts; the current demo you’re watching is using a small Firefox plugin to do its dirty work. The actual IM product is still the same web-based Flash that you’re invoking from your web browser. In a way, you can just think of this as a mini web browser (very mini ).

Source: Ajaxian
Original Article: http://ajaxian.com/archives/the-offline-battle-you-arent-on-a-plane