- google maps for mobile took a long time to deliver on different platforms
- 10+ platforms, 100s of builds
- mobile updates every 6 months, cf. desktop every few weeks
- gears apps can be designed with UI talking only to local database
- background threads then bring in data as it becomes available
- how does Gears compare with HTML5?
- short term — gears
- Opera Mobile (WinMo) & Android Q4 2008
- Expect S60 & BlackBerry in the future
- long term — HTML5…
- geolocation to within 1km with wifi — enough for a lot of apps
- two ways to call: one shot + event-based
- typically takes about 5secs to get a fix
Demos
- Google Search with My Location — Andrei Popescu
- plugs location and postcode into a mobile version of google local search
- fonefood — Marko Balabanovic
- towards the beginning of the year looked at operator location
- doesn’t work outside of home network
- have to get multiple agreements to work around Europe
- also looked at open source cell tower databases
- patchy data
- need to write a native app to get cell ID
- now uses Gears Cell ID, works well for restaurant finding
- shows Google static map with restaurant markers
- rummble — Clive Cox, CTO
- can choose when to ask for permissions (call
getPermission()) - windows mobile:
- always call
db.close()before a page refresh - similarly, lastposition is only useful on a single page
- google provide a whitelist/blacklist of user agents that support gears
- can choose when to ask for permissions (call
- ITN Offline News — Ave Wrigley, Head of Technology Strategy & Innovation
- ITN ON is the new media department of ITN
- also have their own production team: showbiz, lifestyle, etc
- generally produce content for other people, but are starting to go direct to consumer
- use case: “flaky mode” — travelling to work with patchy coverage
- watching videos as well as browsing news
- also using geolocation for local news & weather
- configuration interface — choose categories to browse offline
- settings are on every page of the site
- also forces that updates are grabbed wherever you are on the site
- can find out through gears if the device is offline or online
- don’t have to use XMLHttpRequest
- not part of public API…
- site grays out subscription options when offline
- site warns you how many MB of video you are downloading
- gears managed store is a bit of a black box — can’t tell how much you’ve downloaded
- had to implement their own back-end AJAX call to find this out from the server side!
- 80% of development time has been on platform — Pocket IE is effectively IE4…
- they had to write specific libraries to cope with the crap browser
- debugging is very difficult
- code is in the managed store
- need to make sure that you’re using the right version
- developed techniques to get around that — ask offline
Q&A
- when Series 60 or BlackBerry?
- sometime soon…
- will Google develop a gears translation layer for HTML5 browsers?
- probably not — HTML5 is the standard, not gears
- will gears integrate with GWT?
- probably soon
