Using Gmail, Calendar and Docs without an Internet connection

This is a cross-post from the Gmail blog

The great thing about web apps is that you can access all of your information on the go, and we’ve introduced ways to use Google Apps on a variety of devices like mobile phones and tablets. But it’s inevitable that you’ll occasionally find yourself in situations when you don’t have an Internet connection, like planes, trains and carpools. When we announced Chromebooks at Google I/O 2011, we talked about bringing offline access to our web apps, and now we’re taking our first steps in that direction. Gmail offline will be available today, and offline for Google Calendar and Google Docs will be rolling out over the next week, starting today.



Gmail Offline is a Chrome Web Store app that’s intended for situations when you need to read, respond to, organise and archive email without an internet connection. This HTML5-powered app is based on the Gmail web app for tablets, which was built to function with or without web access. After you install the Gmail Offline app from the Chrome Web Store, you can continue using Gmail when you lose your connection by clicking the Gmail Offline icon on Chrome’s “new tab” page.





Google Calendar and Google Docs let you seamlessly transition between on- and offline modes. When you’re offline in Google Calendar, you can view events from your calendars and RSVP to appointments. With Google Docs you can view documents and spreadsheets when you don’t have a connection. Offline editing isn’t ready yet, but we know it’s important to many of you, and we’re working hard to make it a reality. To get started using Google Calendar or Google Docs offline, just click the gear icon at the top right corner of the web app and select the option for offline access.



IT administrators can deploy Chrome Web Store apps to users en masse by setting up organisational policies for Chrome.



Today’s world doesn’t slow down when you’re offline and it’s a great feeling to be productive from anywhere, on any device, at any time. We’re pushing the boundaries of modern browsers to make this possible, and while we hope that many users will already find today’s offline functionality useful, this is only the beginning. Support for offline document editing and customising the amount of email to be synchronised will be coming in the future. We also look forward to making offline access more widely available when other browsers support advanced functionality (like background pages).

Posted by Benoît de Boursetty, Product Manager

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Blogger’s fresh new look

Posted by: Chang Kim, Product Manager

As you may have heard, things are starting to look a little different across many Google products—and today, Blogger is the next product to get a makeover.

It’s been a few years since we made major updates to Blogger’s look and feel, and there’s a lot more to these changes than just shiny new graphics. We’ve rewritten the entire editing and management experience from scratch so it’s faster and more efficient for you—and easier for us to update and improve over time.

Throughout the design process, we conducted user interviews to help identify how to make Blogger even easier and more enjoyable to use. We also watched users try our new interface and made many refinements based on their feedback.

A streamlined blogging experience
Whether you’re on a dashboard or settings page of blogger.com, you can always create or edit posts with just one click at the top of the screen. Additionally, the post editor has been expanded and simplified to give you a larger canvas for drafting and previewing your work.

Monitor and grow your audience at a glance
In the new “Overview” section of your dashboard, you’ll be able to quickly get a pulse for how people are reacting to your blog with a graph of your most recent traffic numbers, comment activity and follower counts. For extra guidance and inspiration, you’ll also find a list of helpful links, a feed of Blogger updates and a showcase of other blogs you may find interesting.

Opt in now
Starting today, we’ll gradually let all bloggers choose to turn on the new UI, so your Blogger experience won’t be updated until you enable it. Over the next few days, keep an eye out for a pop-up announcement on your dashboard with instructions on how to get started, and check out this Blogger Help Center page to learn more about what’s changed.

If you have suggestions or feedback about the new look, click the gear icon in the top right of the navigation bar and select “Send Feedback.”

We’re working hard to fundamentally revamp and improve the Blogger experience from the ground up, and we hope you enjoy the first in a series of major updates that are on their way in the coming months.

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Viocorp broadcasts clear signal for growth with Google Apps

Editor’s note: Today’s guest blogger is Ian Gardiner, CEO of Viocorp, a leading provider of digital broadcast video solutions in Asia Pacific. See what other organisations that have gone Google have to say.



Viocorp has provided digital broadcast video solutions to local and global corporations, governments, and media companies since 2002. The video webcasts we host, such as the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race or World Youth Day, often attract millions of viewers worldwide. We manage the back-end infrastructure to encode and deliver video of these events online, giving businesses an easy way to publish these digital media webcasts. Our customers don’t have to install anything on their end. They just buy a username and password and we deliver our services through the web browser.



Prior to Google Apps, we used a legacy on-premise solution to support our communication needs. Exchange had several shortcomings which became especially obvious as our business started to expand. Employees working from home and on the road had frequent problems with mobile email access and with synchronisation of email across multiple devices. Our IT staff spent hundreds of hours each year managing and maintaining our email server when they could have been improving our video software solutions.



As a company that provides its services entirely online, we saw Google Apps for Business as a natural fit. Deployment was very easy and there were no major issues since Google Apps supports user choice, enabling us to have a gradual transition. Initially most of our users chose to maintain Microsoft Outlook as their email client, but today, given the option between Gmail or Microsoft Outlook, 90 percent of our employees choose Gmail.



We’ve also adopted Google Calendar to set up meetings and reserve shared resources such as conference rooms. Google Talk and Google Docs let us create, share, and collaborate faster than ever, moving projects forward as teams connected by real time information. Most importantly, Google Apps lets our employees work from anywhere with any smartphone or web-enabled tablet. When I’m in transit to client meetings, I can use my phone to email, chat, or even review my presentation in Google Docs. And every month we get new features that support innovation and efficiency within the company—at no extra cost.



Compared with our previous solution, managing Google Apps is incredibly easy. We think moving to Google Apps saves Viocorp well over 200 hours (approx. 5 weeks) of IT work annually, with no drawbacks in service or uptime. Although we definitely saved money by switching to Google Apps, the real value for us goes far beyond reduced costs. The question was, will Google Apps allow us to work more effectively? And when we ask our employees, the answer is “yes, without a doubt”.

Posted by Ian Gardiner, CEO of Viocorp

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Innovation and the importance of failure

Last night I was interviewed by Paul Barclay on Australia Talks on ABC Radio National on Google's culture of innovation and the importance of failure.  I could write all day about why failure is actually a GOOD THING (perhaps a future blog post), but here is the 4-minute audio version. The full show can be found here.

And while on the subject of innovation, I'll be talking at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas on the controversial topic of what's killing Australian Innovation at the Sydney Opera House on October 2nd.  Come along and join in the fun.

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Celebrating developers: Developer Day registration open

Calling all developers! We've opened registration for developers to attend Google Developer Day 2011 in Sydney on November 8th, 2011. It should be a great line up with explorations of the latest developments in Android, Chrome, HTML5, Cloud and more. It will take place at the Sydney Convention and Exhibition Centre.



While we’re talking all-things developer, we wanted to send congratulations to Peter Finch, Brian McKenna, and Marko Vuksanovic, the Australian winners of the Open Call for Developers HTML5 challenge.



Screenshots of their beautiful creations are featured below: each participant of the challenge was asked to design and implement an original HTML5 doodle of the Google Developer day Dymaxion map, adding their own local twist. Doodles had to be built using open web technologies (HTML5, WebGL, etc.) and feature a local theme.

Creator: Peter Finch

How did you do it? The doodle is created using a HTML5 2D canvas element. The Dymaxion map is programmatically generated by subdividing the triangles in the original map into smaller sub-triangles and then drawing all of them in different colours based on a colour map representing the image to be drawn. The colour maps were generated using a Java program that mapped the relative location of the triangle onto a target image and then back onto the page colour map. The waves then merge the images, one on top of another, to create the transition effect.

Creator: Brian McKenna

How did you do it? I imported the Dymaxion map to Blender and then animated it to transform into the Opera House using "shape keys". The Dymaxion map, Opera House, Southern Cross and stars all rendered using Three.js. Everything else rendered with normal HTML5/CSS3.





Creator: Marko Vuksanovic

How did you do it? Doodle is a manipulation of the Dymaxion map using HTML canvas element. Interactivity is achieved using native drag and drop events and transitions. Animations are used to transition between the iconic landmarks of Sydney.



Congratulations to Brian, Marko and Peter - and hope to see you all at Google Developer Day in November.



Posted by Alan Noble, Director of Engineering Google Australia.

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Owliver!

Last Tuesday we were lucky enough to have a special visitor to the window ledge of our office.

As it was my birthday, I secretly hoped this little guy was bringing me an invitation to Hogwarts but it seemed he just wanted to see what we were up to at Google. I snapped a couple of pictures and this one was my favourite.



The Sydney Morning Herald called him Barney, but there have been a bunch of names thrown around our office, including Owliver, Ow-lan Noble (in homage to our Director of Engineering) and Colonowl Whobert von Owlivander.



Our friends at WIRES helped Owliver out after he was injured flying, and released him back into Pyrmont at dusk last night.



We hope you enjoy looking at him as much as we did.



Posted by Carson Page, Learning and Development, Google Australia.

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The Internet and the future of work

When Deloitte Access Economics gave us the results of their research on the impact of the Internet on the Australian economy, I turned directly to the section on “The Impact of the Internet on Businesses”. In the Google Enterprise team, we see every day that the Internet has transformed the way businesses operate. But I was curious to see the numbers around how it’s transforming how people work.

I’d also heard the Australian Government’s goal of doubling the level of teleworking in the Australian economy by 2020 -- a call that was repeated this week at Telework Sydney by Minister Stephen Conroy. He said that the internet promises to transform “who is able to work, when you can work, where you can work and how you can work” -- with huge benefits to both employers and employees. This vision becomes a reality with the rollout of high speed broadband access to all Australians.

According to the Deloitte Access Economics report “The Connected Continent,” more than 40% of businesses surveyed report that the internet has already impacted the ability of their staff to work remotely and enables flexible working arrangements.

This is a good solid number and not a surprise. But that still means that well over half of businesses may not be taking advantage of the combination of high speed broadband access and cloud-based applications that can make a big difference to how their teams work -- and live.

If you want to give team members a day a week to work from home, you can still keep productivity high and hassle-free. You can sit down and collaborate on a document together easily, without the hassle of emailing attachments back and forth and forgetting who has the latest version. With Google Docs, you can see your teammate making changes right on the screen -- the words are literally appearing and changing before your eyes. Internet-based applications are also making the smartphones and tablets that many of us have much more useful; you can easily get to your mail, documents, and calendar even when you’re not at your desk.

And then there’s the fact that it’s hard to convince Aussies to move cities. If your dream employee lives in Melbourne and you can’t convince them to move to Sydney, you now have a lot more effective (and cost-effective) tools that make it easy to build team bonds across distance. Video technology keeps getting easier to use, so remote employees don’t have to miss the team bonding. We’ve built video chat right into Gmail so it’s always easily at hand. At Google we hop on and off video chats all day -- even with people in the same office -- to get that extra connection of face to face conversation.

At Google, we’re going to keep making our tools for team collaboration even better. And as high speed broadband access becomes a reality across more of Australia, these new ways of working are going to become the norm, not a nice to have. Are you ready to embrace this new way of working?

Posted by Stuart McLean, Enterprise Sales Lead, Australia and New Zealand

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The Connected Continent: how big is the Internet in AUD?

The Internet’s always been easy to measure in terms of users, bandwidth or time. Working out how all those things add to the national bottom line is surprisingly hard. (Imagine trying to quantify the economic impact of the steam engine or electricity when those inventions were in their earliest days.) Given that the Internet is shifting every industry into a different gear, we decided to give it a shot. We asked Deloitte Access Economics to take an in-depth look at what the Internet is actually bringing to Australia in economic terms.



Deloitte’s report “The Connected Continent,” the first of its kind in Australia, finds that the Internet contributed 3.6% of Australia’s GDP in 2010. That’s the same as Australia’s iron-ore exports. The report digs into which businesses and industries use the Internet and tries to put a dollar figure on how much Australians get from the Internet. Here are some of the key findings:

• Australia’s Internet economy is likely to grow by $20 billion over the next five years, to roughly AUD$70 billion -- this is a 7% growth rate, which is twice as fast as the forecast for the rest of the economy.
• Productivity increases in businesses and government enabled by the Internet are estimated to boost GDP by around $27 billion in 2011.
• Households benefit from Internet use in the form of added convenience and a greater variety of goods and services; this is estimated to be worth an additional $53 billion, only some of which is reflected in GDP statistics.
• Every business in a small-business survey used the Internet to some extent, but only half had a website.

It’s clear from this research that Australia’s main industries are rewiring themselves around the Internet, and that a healthy digital economy is crucial to our future. But how did the Internet grow to be as large as our main commodity export? The answer is that the Internet boom is one that every business in Australia is contributing to. These days, every business in Australia is an Internet business. They might not realise it yet, but those that do are reporting huge benefits. Aussie Farmers Direct now generates over $100 million a year by selling fresh food online. Or take AuctionsPlus, which sold 2.2 million sheep via an online auction process to farmers at home and overseas last year.

The report is the latest in a series of reports sponsored by Google that try to measure the impact of the Internet. It also follows a research report from McKinsey that found that the Internet economies of the G-8 and Brazil, India, China, South Korea and Sweden accounted for 21% of GDP growth over the past 15 years.



The full report is available at www.connectedcontinent.com.au.



Posted by Nick Leeder, Managing Director, Google Australia & New Zealand

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Latest updates, August 1st

Posted by Brett Wiltshire, Product Operations

Hello Bloggers!

Over the last few days we’ve rolled out a handful of updates, all of which are available to everyone right now. Here’s the rundown:

Favicon graduates from Draft

As we announced on the Blogger in Draft blog earlier this month, we now offer an easy tool for creating custom favicons on your Blogger blog. We’re happy to announce today that this feature is now available to all Blogger users.

Since the initial release to Draft, we’ve added support for all image types (JPEG, PNG, GIF, etc) and will now automatically resize the image to the correct favicon specifications. You can add a custom favicon to your blog right now on the Design | Page Elements tab, via the new favicon element shown below:

Swipe navigation for Mobile views

Adding to the featureset of our new mobile templates, you can now navigate through your mobile view with swipe navigation. This new navigation option lets you swipe through individual blog posts in a way that should feel very familiar for mobile and tablet users.

If you are viewing this post from a mobile device, you can give this a try right now!


Support for +1 on Pages
A few weeks ago we announced the +1 button on Blogger, and now we’re happy to expand coverage to individual pages as well as blog posts. The +1 button will now appear on Pages as an option on the sharing widget just as it has appeared for individual blog posts.

That’s it for now, more to come soon! Happy Blogging.

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