Offline solutions
September 29, 2008 by Becky Scott
For the past week, I’ve been using a much slower connection than normal (and it will continue this week). Since I’m used to high-speed internet access, many of my online solutions don’t take connection speed into account. Yet I’m learning that even simple things like Gmail, online calendars, and RSS readers perform completely different when you have to use a modem.
So I’ll be looking for low bandwidth and offline solutions for you. I need to remember that not all organizational tips have to be online or even electronic. Sometimes a good, old-fashioned idea can be the best one.
If you have any tips or tricks you’d like to contribute, or have a question about workarounds, please let me know in the comments or via e-mail (my address is listed in the sidebar).
I already talked about Tickler files, but I may go into more detail about how something like that can still be quite useful, even in the electronic age.
Image: Newscom
I definitely ran into those bandwidth and sluggish connection issues when I was traveling overseas in Africa last summer. Definitely need different strategies if your connection is slow or inconsistenly available.
For Gmail, I would suggest using a desktop mail client such as outlook and using Gmail’s pop access to download your mail. Slower up-front to download all the messages, but less latency between messages, making it overall more efficient (plus you can always compose your replies while you are offline and queue them to send when you are back online).
For rss newsreaders, I would suggest using one that has an “offline mode”. I stopped using Google Reader and started using NewsGator’s FeedDemon precisely for this reason. It still has the online synchronization I’d come to expect, but being able to press download, walk away and refill your coffee, and come back and have all your feeds ready to read, even if your connection drops.
The same kind of principle applies to uploading photos as well. I keep my online photos on flickr. I found when I had a slow/latent connection that it was much faster to upload my photos using the “uploader application” than using the web-form, as the uploader application only has to be downloaded once, not every time you visit the site, plus it cuts down on how many pages you have to visit to upload your photos (all the way down to none necessary) and you can walk away from the computer while they upload and do something more productive than waiting for the form to say “next photo”. Scaling the high-res digital photos to a reasonable file size (screen viewing resolutions) in photoshop (or editor of your choice) also made it more practically possible to have time to upload more photos than I otherwise could over a slow connection.
Oh, and I fogot to mention this in my other comment, but I found that not all web-services are created equal. Even such a simple difference such as whether you use Yahoo Mail or Gmail might make a big difference in speed on a slow connection…in Africa, Yahoo was much faster than Gmail. Setting “text only” (or low bandwidth) mode on Gmail helped a lot, except thenot so minor inconvenience that when you go to type an email to someone there’s no “address book” button and the auto-complete mode has been disabled to save bandwidth.
If you always have a slow connection, I’d shop around and try all your competing options to see whether there’s a noticable usability difference between them.
Also, many online sites have a low-bandwidth “mobile” mode (typically designed for mobile phones and pdas) you can access by typing in a special URL…using the mobile website might be an option to consider as well!
Jessica – I found that when my connection is slow, Gmail offers an html version. But I do mostly use pop access, as you mentioned.
I use an offline editor for blog posts, which helps tremendously. And it compresses photos for me. However, it’s the searching for photos that is difficult. Many of the sites use javascript and other things that take a lot of time and bandwidth.
Google reader also offers an offline mode, but I’ve never used it. It’s an idea, though. What differences do you notice between it and NewsGator?
I do use Flickr Uploader for mac, and I have it set to reduce the size of all of my photos. I love that it reduces them automatically.
I love your suggestion about finding the mobile version of a site. A lot of sites look for what browser you’re using and if it’s a mobile version it automatically sends you the pared-down version. But I’ll search and see if I can find the address for sites that I use frequently.