web apps

Google now provides users of its suite of hosted applications with a way to quickly check the status of Google Apps services. The new Google Apps Status Dashboard tells you whether a given Apps service is down for everyone, or just for you. A very timely launch by Google, after a couple of hours of Gmail outage nearly caused an online panic yesterday.

Fresh from the Google Labs comes a new experimental feature for Gmail--the ability to use the application in offline mode and then transfer messages when an internet connection is available. This latest addition to the company's email service is certain to make life easier for people who communicate online on the move.

Google has extended the Service Level Agreement for the paid edition of its online productivity suite to offer 99.9% availability. Strictly speaking, the "three nines" uptime guarantee translates to less than 9 hours of service interruption per year, total, but Google's calculation of uptime will disregard outages shorter than 10 minutes. Read on for details.

SmashingApps--are they related to the ever excellent Smashing Magazine?--published a list of 13 online tools that help you create and host a site, for free. Not exactly material for professional web designers and high-traffic websites, but still an inspiring and interesting selection.

Dreamhost, an established web hosting provider, recommended to their clients to consider using Google's webmail interface over their own email offerings. The reason cited was that support requests for email problems constituted the majority of all support calls and messages. The web hosting company will continue to run its own email servers and offer their own service to clients.

Google will allow web developers to load popular JavaScript libraries for their web apps from the company's global server network. Currently the following frameworks are supported: jQuery, Prototype, script.aculo.us, MooTools, and dojo; this selection covers the most popular JavaScript libraries.