Google fanatics and Mac power users are experience a bad case of digital doldrums tonight. While starting the week off on a high with Gmail Offline support officially rolling out to everyone — and not relegated to a simple, option lab feature — many will be ending on a completely different plane. You see, in order for Gmail’s offline features to work, your browser needs to support Google Gears. Macs don’t do support Google Gears, but only through Firefox. Safari support is hit and miss. And Google Chrome is moving to HTML 5… But all is not lost — in the impending future anyway.
Google themselves came forward recently and announced that they were abandoning Gears and instead putting the majority of their developing muscle behind HTML5. The biggest benefit of course being widespread and non-proprietary support as well as a close feature set to Gears with untapped potential for future innovations.
I could tell you happy tales of HTML 5 and open source development all day. But it won’t mask the cold hard reality that settles in when the glitz and glamor of “HTML 5″ wear off. The reality being that for the hear and now, Mac users are left in the dark when it comes to offline Gmail support. As of writing there isn’t a solution for Chrome/Gears use on Macs. But give it some time. I’m sure some crafty developer can whip something mighty tasty up. Though I’m sure you would just as easily be pleased if Google hopped to it and whipped up some offline Gmail support via HTML 5.
Of course there is that one small problem of HTML 5 not actually being a standard yet….
Cnet
Are you a fancier of movie rentals or simply rentals in general? Some people like constant change. For those individuals, renting items and services for short periods of time and constantly switching things up is the way to go — for them anyway. I myself am more of a buy/rent-to-own kind of person. iTunes started dipping it’s toes in the streaming/rental program recently giving users $1.99 access to individual TV episodes that could be streamed and stored locally on their hard drives. For TV buffs, it’s all bliss and flowers. So far, movie studios, the TV industry and pretty much any other entertainment related sector of the industry have dragged their feet getting on bored with this whole internet bandwagon. An emerging pay-per-stream TV episode deal with YouTube however could signal a change. Could the media/entertainment industry finally start embracing the online revolution?
The one thing that immediately sours the whole YouTube deal for me is that under the current unfinished deal, YouTube would charge $1.99 for streaming TV episodes — no local copies/downloads. Can we stream the episode multiple times once we’ve purchased the privilege? Is there a higher fee that would allow the content to be downloaded? Those are two of the biggest questions and reservations I have. Another thing that worries me is that even though Google understands the pricing structure needed to succeed online, we’ve seen countless times how the entertainment industry does not. With that said, if the price to stream TV shows *without* any download option creeps above $1.99, it will fail. $2.99, $3.99, and $4.99 are simply too much to for a one time, stream only TV episode. Again, this is considering that we won’t get an option to download….
