Snow Leopard Without Gears is Hurting my Mobile Productivity

no-google-gears-snow-leopard

Lately I’ve been using my netbook when on the run, so I hadn’t noticed that I recently lost a very key bit of functionality. I’m talking about Google Gears and its utter lack of support for Mac OS X Snow Leopard. I just tried to install it and received the disappointing message above, which I roughly paraphrase as “No Gears for you… NEXT!” And that’s hurting my mobile workflow.

Hitting up the actual Google Gears site and examining the support requirements confirms the situation. For Mac users, you need:

  • Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.3+ or Tiger 10.4.11+, G4+/Intel CPU
  • Safari 3.1.1+ (where’s Chrome, I say?)

Talk about totally disappointing. I don’t know — nor do I care — if this is an issue with Google, with Apple or both, but it has a big impact on my mobile workflow. Even if you don’t use Gears, hear me out on this one. Two key Google services I’m completely dependent upon are Gmail (both work and personal) and Reader. Each of these supports Google Gears for offline use. Now while I do have a 3G USB adapter as well as a paid Boingo Wi-Fi account and an iPhone capable of Internet Tethering, I often turn my connectivity off on purpose. Yes, you heard that correctly — I turn off my connectivity.

This is a practice I’ve adopted over the past year or so and I only use it when mobile. Why would I do such a silly thing? Two words — battery life. I’ve learned that I really don’t need constant connectivity in my mobile routine. Why have an extra radio running when I can use Google Gears to pull down all of my mail or hundreds of posts via RSS, and then read them in an offline mode? I realize that today’s wireless radios use little power when idle, but I find that that I can easily get between 10 and 20 percent more run-time when I use my offline approach in lieu of constant connectivity. Once I’m through all of the offline activities, I fire up my radio, let Google Gears do its sync thing and I repeat the process as necessary.

But that’s no longer the case when using my MacBook with Snow Leopard. And that hurts my workflow in addition to my battery life. For now, I’m going to use a hacked version of Gears that bypasses the OS version check. It requires that I run Safari in 32-bit mode, but that’s far less of nuisance than having my battery drain faster. Here’s hoping someone gets their rear in “gear” and brings official support to Snow Leopard soon.

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post