After Google Calender on Google Aps goes offline last month, finally the offline version of Google Calender is made available for all users.
What you need to do to bring your Google Calendar offline:
To enable offline Calendar access, sign in to Google Calendar and look for the “Offline Beta” link in the upper right-hand corner of your account, next to your username. We’ve released this early and are still ironing out some kinks, so if you encounter any issues, be sure to let us know. If you access Calendar through the Premier or Education Editions of Google Apps, your domain administrator will first have to elect to turn on new features from the Domain Settings page of the Google Apps control panel.
Users of Google Calendar in Google Apps can now bring their Google Calendar offline. But unlike Offline Gmail than run with half functionality (you can star, label, compose and reply email) even when they disconnected from internet (it will be sent later once connected), Offline Calendar only let you view the existing schedule and events, but not edit them.
To enable this feature, sign in to your Google Apps’s Calendar, and click the ‘Offline Beta‘ link available on the upper right-hand corner of your account (screen shot below)
The feature availability depend on the version you use. Google Apps Standard Edition (free version that I use) users has this feature available immediately.
But Premier and Education Edition users has to wait the domain administrators to first check the box next to ‘Turn on new features‘ in the ‘Domain Settings‘ page of the Google Apps control panel before they can enable this option.
Unfortunately, this feature has yet available for ordinary Google account’s Calendar. Maybe soon??
Ultimately, this is what every Gmail users wish I guess, to be able to access and read Gmail even when there is no/limited internet connection. And yesterday, Gmail team make it happen although it is currently limited to everyone who uses Gmail in US or UK.
Like Google Reader which goes offline last year, Gmail is going to the same way utilizing Google Gears. That means, Gears will download local cache of your emails to your local drive. It will automatically synchronize the mailbox with the email’s cache version once connected to internet connection, as well as automatically switched to offline version when disconnected from internet.
Theoretically it works charm right? So you have not to worry about losing data in the midst of sending an email when all of sudden you’re disconnected from internet, since the email copy will be kept in outbox and re-send when the connection is back.
Beside that, it is said that offline version allowing you to do whatever you used to do with your emails, just like as if you’re connected to the internet.
So lets hope it will reach us soon, and if it is up to the expectation. Read the anouncement post.
Oh yeah, it’s finally released. I guess some of you might grumbling. why WordPress team is releasing a new version quite often lately. It’s barely 3 months after major release of 2.5, follow by bug fix version on 2.5.1. I know i know.. you’re tired of upgrading isn’t it. (especially when the WAU plugin doesn’t work)
I manage to install 2.6 in my personal blog using WordPress Automatic Upgrade (WAU) plugin. The fully auto mode is not working and stuck on step # 2 (backup database) as the exec() function was disabled on my hosting. So I choose semi auto mode, skip the DB backup (not recommended if you have tonnes of content) and completed all steps in less than 5 minutes
User interface wise, there is not much different, except on the plugin and manage posts/pages menu. Both now has check box to select multiple option. Plugins also were now separated between active and inactive plugins. On the Plugin tab menu, there is a small red numbers indicating how many plugin is out dated
There are couple of interesting features on this release. For me, the top feature is non other than the post revisions where it keep a version of your saved draft, which can be viewed later. Oh wait, you can compare them and restore it anytime you want!
You also can preview the theme before activating it from the control panel. I was mistakenly interpreting this feature on my previous post that this is kinda like a theme preview plugin. (saying to myself: SWITCH and PREVIEW is not similar ZAKI!). I definitely need more English lesson.. lol
Then, there is GEARS support to speed up the blog loading espcially on the slow internet connection. It cached the CSS and javascript on the local disk.
What else?? The are new image control (caption, resize, a new gallery), customizing the gravatar, bookmarklet (called press this) bla bla bla and etc.
On the compatibility issue, WordPress dev team has mentioned that most of the themes and plugins released for 2.5 should be compatible with 2.6. But I found that couple of plugins installed in my blog has a new update released for this version. Plugin dev should have more work now to ensure their plugin compatibility. Kudos to you guys!!
If you still uncertain to upgrade or not, or has not yet upgrade even to 2.5.1, perhaps the video and the full features list will help you to decide if you’re going for 2.6 now.
