The Project Draw Google Gears Experience

A feature of Project Draw 0.7 is support for Google Gears. As part of our testing process, I thought I would share my Project Draw experience. Amid a purple haze of activity last week, I used an internal test server. Now you can do the same thing on the Project Draw server since Project Draw 0.7 is publicly available. Are you experienced?

1. 
   The first step is to install Google Gears. I went to http://gears.google.com, downloaded the GoogleGearsSetup.exe installer, and installed it. This is actually not a requirement. Project Draw will ask you if you wish to use Google Gears and help you install it. I just did this in advance on my own.

2. Running the installer asks you to restart the browser. After doing so, in my case Internet Explorer 7.0 asked me to run an ActiveX control. After doing so, Google Gears was installed:
   

3. Armed with the ability to store and serve application resources locally, I navigated to http://draw.labs.autodesk.com. On getting there, I was greeted with a dialog box:
   
   I clicked on Allow and elected to have this choice remembered. I was now ready to rock 'n' roll with Project Draw.

4. I created a simple diagram by dragging and dropping some furniture shapes.
   

5. I saved my diagram as google_gears_sample.
   

6. At this point, I had been working online as indicated in the menu bar:
   

7. I then decided to take the plunge and go offline:
   

8. Project Draw provided me with an alert that I was going offline:
   
   I clicked OK.

9. Project Draw displayed a synchronization process message:
   
   The process took several minutes. Please be patient.

10. When completed, Project Draw let me know:
    

11. I exited the browser and disconnected from the internet. After doing so, I fired up my browser. My home page is the blog so I got:
    
    So I was really disconnected.

12. I navigated to http://draw.labs.autodesk.com as usual. Project Draw let me know I was disconnected:
    

13. I loaded my drawing using the File menu. I added a lamp. I guess you could say I Saw The Light. I added a plant. To do so, I had to move the bed over a little bit to make room. I saved my drawing just as if I was saving it to the Project Draw server. I exited the browser.

14. I reconnected to the internet. I navigated to http://draw.labs.autodesk.com as usual. I clicked on the ONLINE menu item. Project Draw took only a few seconds to synchronize. It let me know when it was done:
    

15. I loaded my diagram from the file menu. Would my changes be there? Oh the excitement of it all! Yes indeed:
    
    There was my table with the lamp and the plant.

16. I logged into Autodesk Labs on another computer. I navigated to the Project Draw site and saw the diagram with the lamp and plant. The changes are really saved to the server as part of synchronization. It was not just browser cache serendipity. Mission accomplished.

Allowing customers to work when disconnected from the web is alive in the lab.