During the week I commute between Luzern and Zurich by train.  Normally I do some work on the train, using the work issue laptop, but disconnected from the net.  For work we're stuck with Lotus Notes which has a reasonable offline mode, I can sync my mail when I get back to the office, it syncs with my Blackberry, it works mostly fine.  The problem was when I don't work I often want to send a personal email.  But I despise using my work email to send personal emails.  I used to compose the email in a text editor.

 

Recently Gmail has be brewing something in their labs.  It allows users to use Gmail offline.  This is seriously cool stuff!!  All you need to do is enable it and it will download all your emails to your local computer, this takes some time, but you can go offline before it is complete.  An icon is installed on your desktop and you can use this to access Gmail offline.  The offline version has no compromises.  You can do everything you can do while online, except, of course, things that require a connection like real-time chat.  You can search your email for keywords, and it is just as fast as when you are online.  When entering someone in the "to" field your favourite peoples names appear, like normal.  Attachments are included and can be "downloaded".  While offline an "Outbox" appears and this is where your sent mail is stored.

 

All you need to do is install gears.  It even works on IE, but I use it on chrome which I believe comes with gears built-in.

 

I highly recommend this one for those who want to use gmail on the go, without a network connection.

Thanks to Andy for the pic.

Car Free Day: 22 September (Monday) and Software Freedom Day 20 September (Saturday) These two are global events being celebrated locally all over the world. I know Wellington has a large event planned for Software Freedom Day but I haven't heard anything about local Car Free Day events. Does anyone know of anything happening in NZ?

And there's some people out there still using ie6, haha (as a web developer unfortunately not so funny).