Offline behavior

Wednesday, November 28, 2007 at 2:47 PM

Posted by Teodor Filimon, Gadget Developer

In this ever-growing world, new communications channels emerge all the time. In fact, communication engulfs almost every aspect of our lives, and this is certainly evident in our programming experience. My latest article, Proper Offline Behaviour, shows that communication is important even when our computers aren't connected to the largest information source, the Internet.

A gadget can communicate:

• with the machine it's installed on, to see whether the machine is online or offline (and a lot more :-)
• with Google Desktop, through the APIs, to implement cool features
• with itself, because a program doesn't run forever
• with the user, most importantly, because the user needs to understand the information that the gadget presents

Remember that it is the user who we're writing a gadget for in the first place, so we have to provide the best experience possible. I hope my article will help you in this quest. :-)