Comments on: Hosted vs. Local applications

By: Philip Haine

Philip Haine — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:37:59 +0000

It should be noted that Google introduced Google Gears in May 2007, about a year after this article was published.

Gears was to provide offline access to web apps, so this is now designated as a stolen ideas. (They never even said thanks!)

As of this writing (3/23/10) support for Gears has wanted. Only Google Docs supposedly allows it, and I had read that Google is putting Gears aside to focus on the same functionality in the upcoming HTML5.

By: Russell Maher

Russell Maher — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 18:34:42 +0000

Lotus Notes has had exactly this functionality (and extremely securely) for about five years.

By: Philip Haine

Philip Haine — Sat, 02 Jun 2007 03:04:03 +0000

Vision stolen! Eleven months later, Google has released a beta version of Gears, which allows browser-based apps to run locally. This is the dawn of "Either/Or Apps" that can be run either on a server or locally or both.

By: Steal This Idea » DabbleDB, FileMaker Pro, and Innovation

Steal This Idea » DabbleDB, FileMaker Pro, and Innovation — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 21:07:52 +0000

[...] For more on the trade-offs between hosted versus local apps, see: hosted vs. local computing. [...]

By: Philip Haine

Philip Haine — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:43:16 +0000

TurboTax Online stores your tax return information online. They just had a (minor) security breach, demonstrating one of the risks of storing sensitive information on someone else's servers. A TurboTax user was able to view the full tax returns of a handful of other users. The information included social security numbers and bank routing numbers. It happened to H&R Block too. I'll stick with the desktop version, thanks! (Ditto with QuickBooks.)