Zoho Goes Offline (in a good way)

Online office suite Zoho will launch offline functionality for Zoho Writer this morning, and other applications in their suite will follow shortly.

The offline functionality was built on Google Gears, an open source project launched by Google in May 2007. Users will need to install a browser plugin to take advantage of the functionality. After that, an option will appear in the navigation bar to “Go Offline.” The feature works with Internet Explorer v.6 and higher, and with Firefox (including Mac) v1.5 and higher.

For now they are offering read-only functionality offline. Read-write functionality will appear in 3-4 weeks, the company says. Zoho will also begin to roll out offline functionality for their spreadsheet, presentation and other applications in the coming weaks.

Zoho, which competes head-on with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, managed to launch offline functionality on their product before Google did. The fact that they are using Google software to do this makes the story somewhat ironic.

An overview video of the feature is below.

Interview With Facebook’s Joe Hewitt, iPhone God

The Facebook iPhone application was a one-man job. Joe Hewitt joined Facebook when the company he co-founded with Blake Ross, Parakey, was acquired last month. He quickly got to work on the company’s iPhone app, which was released just a month after he joined the company.

Hewitt has been one of the key figures in figuring out some of the hacks around iPhone applications - dealing with no keyboard, the flip screen, etc. He has been a major contributor to the iPhone discussion group at Google and released his own framework and sample code, called iUI, that dozens of other developers have integrated into their own apps.

Nik Cubrilovic and I spoke with Hewitt for 26 minutes late last week to get his thoughts on the challenges and opportunities around iPhone web application development. Hewitt also talks about some of the features he’s like to see to make the iPhone an even better user experience.

Download it at TalkCrunch or listen to it in the audio player below.

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Update: Robert Scoble has a good video interview with Hewitt as well.