Six months ago, we told you about our VK Offline application for Google Chrome, which embodied the concept of client's email and address book based on the data of your VKontakte profiles. Since then, much water has flowed, and the application has grown to the fourth version, embodying almost all of our ideas. Now VK Offline is one of the best applications in the Russian Chrome Web Store, which combines the ease and simplicity of VK dialogs with convenient and familiar features of any E-mail client and address book.

We have come a long way in developing the application and would like to share with you information about the key features that are in the application now, as well as about the basic techniques that we use when developing and testing the application.

Important messages and recycle bin

Since the release, we have become even more imbued with the idea of presenting correspondence and contacts in the form of E-mail and address book . Therefore, we decided to take the most interesting and useful from our point of view possibilities of e-mail - important messages, user tags and a basket .
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Now you can mark the messages received by VKontakte as important , after which you can easily find them in the “Manage your correspondence” -> “Important” section. And if you delete messages in the application, they will be available in the “Manage your correspondence” -> “Deleted” section. And even if they are no longer on the VKontakte site, you can restore them and they will appear on the site again .

At the same time, we added the ability to quickly chat in chat rooms so that it is more convenient to communicate with those of your contacts who express every thought in a separate message.

Voice input of the text, audio and video messages

Voice input has become one of the most frequently used functions in the application. For many, clearly read a large piece of text was much easier than typing it on the keyboard without errors . Also, according to reviews, it turned out to be extremely useful for people with disabilities.



And since VK Offline is also a web app, we have added support for drag-n-drop attachments , favorite by many geeks, when sending messages, as well as many of the html5 features for filling out forms. We are following the main bug fixes in the chromium engine and as soon as this and this bugs are fixed, we will add support for audio and video messages in pure HTML5 without third-party plug-ins.

Access to data without the Internet

VK Offline can work in the absence of the Internet . After data synchronization, your correspondence and contact list will always be available to you. You will not lose important and deleted messages. The only thing that will not work is sending messages and voice typing, although in the light of recent events on Google I / O, we very much hope that text recognition in offline mode will appear in Chrome in the very near future.

Some people forget that Chrome is not only a browser, and they forcefully disable background applications in the settings. And in vain do it, because VK Offline can notify you of new messages even with the browser closed . Importantly, it works on all major operating systems.

Friends' birthdays

The application notifies you of the coming birthday of your friend or girlfriend, even if your browser will be closed at that moment and you will not be connected to the Internet. And by the way about the connection to the Internet - now its presence or absence is determined almost instantly, because in 4 versions of the application we added support for offline events . Try to pull out the ethernet wire or disable wi-fi and see for yourself.

Private information

VK Offline as before is the support of two or more VK accounts and full control over your data . The entire address book and correspondence is stored on your local computer. This is another reason why the application will not be released for other platforms (for example, Mozilla Marketplace) - we care about your privacy.

Some technical details

The application has become more of the one that enters the HTML5 stack. HTML5-forms support has been added, several handy shells have been written for working with LocalStorage / WebDatabase / DOM ( github ) (the application certainly does not use jquery). In the common code, node.js appeared for building localizations, Google Closure Compiler and fork of the famous tipsy library ( github ). Also in version 4 we decided to rely on the native Chrome GC and refused to use the built-in cache with workers, replacing them with asynchronous calls throughout the application. Instead of HTML5 Audio, they began to use the Web Audio API for smoother playing notifications. To check the application update, we use the server on node.js, which provides access to the XML-file updates, as well as the real-time build of the project from github.

Where can I download?

You can install VK Offline from the Chrome Web Store or from the promo page of the application . If you wish to thank the developers and testers, simply click on the LIKE icon in the upper right corner of the application window after its installation. We will be very pleased :)