Mail.app vs Gmail
It's been a month that I have been using nothing but Gmail on my home computer. On my iPhone I typically use the Mail.app instead of Gmail directly. Problem with Gmail on the iPhone is that the web app chooses more for me than I am allowed to choose. If I want to email someone from the phone using Gmail it will only pull my most contacted addresses. I have to actually search for who I want to email first then start composing. Ok but this is not about Gmail on the iPhone but how usable Gmail over Mail.app provided by Apple is. I like the ability to search my emails from Spotlight and with Mail I can do that. Now Google has come up with Precipitate. It allows you to search from Spotlight your data that is in the cloud. Right now it only supports Google Bookmarks, and Google Docs but I'm sure they'll expand it to include Gmail. With about 7 gigs worth of storage space it will take a long time to fill up. I could still use IMAP and connect Mail with Gmail without problems but I want to use mostly web apps for my experiment about living in the cloud. I have to admit that I love firing up Safari and connecting to Gmail. I like the idea of labels vs folders — rather than breaking up where all my emails are I know that they are all in Gmail. Labels allow me to segregate those emails from each other but at the same time I don't have to go into separate folders to try to find a particular email. I also like that you can create very filters to help categorize information and to act on them if necessary. It's limited in comparison to Mail's rules. With Mail you can create AppleScripts that can allow emails to trigger actions on your computer and that is very powerful. With Google Gears and knowledge of Javascript you could achieve the same thing. The biggest difference is that with Gmail knowledge of HTML/Javascript can help you make changes to the Style Sheets of Gmail and recreate design the UI to something that suits your purposes without having to learn another language. That is something that I find more useful. Of course I have to learn those languages in order for them to be useful but I would have to do the same for Mail.app. And with Mail.app I wouldn't be able to change the UI even once I did learn AppleScript just be able to add to it.
So far I'm sticking with Gmail.
Office vs Google Docs
I've also been using nothing but Google Docs instead of Office. Now Microsoft is beginning to invade the cloud with Azure. Now I haven't been completely using Google Docs instead of Office. At work they don't give us access to Google Docs so I have to use Office. But I was able to get one of my teachers to accept my assignments under Google Docs. We had some problems with an essay but for the most part it's been successful. I've enjoyed using Google Docs and with Google Gears it is supposed to be able to be offline. I haven't been able to edit any documents offline nor create a document offline again that is something that would be corrected in the future. That's the interesting thing about Google Apps is that most of them are in Beta. They give you a taste but are still missing a lot of the functionality of most Office applications. Pagination with Headers and Footers is the biggest issue that I currently have. For the most part I don't miss Office but I cant wait until the offline functionality is better.
Hey at least for blogging Google fixed the title posting issue that I had earlier this year so I'm confident that offline support will be better in the future.
So, living in the Cloud is pretty much living in Beta.
