Google Gears Does Offline Applications
Little late on this, but I missed it last week when it happened: Google released a new program, Google Gears, which allows websites to make offline versions of themselves.
As a way of showing off what Google Gears is capable of, Google added support for it to Google Reader, its RSS news reader. Once you’ve installed the Google Gears browser plug-in (for IE 6.0 or Firefox 1.5 on Windows, Mac and Linux), you’ll get a new link in Reader labeled with a sort of sync icon. Click it, and Gears syncs up to 2,000 items from Reader, ready for you to read when offline.
Gears is a major play for Google, one that will help it compete with traditional desktop software by removing a major sticking point with users, that their stuff doesn’t work without an internet connection. Obviously, the bigger goal has got to be getting Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Gmail and Calendar to work without an internet connection, but as a technology preview, Reader shows off exactly what is possible and leaves us hoping for even more.
The plugin is a 700K download for Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+ that installs three developer APIs. One API will handle the creation of data objects to store application information locally, another will be a SQLite relational database for searching the data, and the final part will enable asynchronous JavaScript so applications can sync data in the background without overburdening the browser. More info on the APIs are available at the gears website.
Other developers will hopefully build off Gears, giving their applications offline modes, although we haven’t heard any announced yet. When they are, you can be sure you’ll read about them at the Google Gears blog.
Google also released a new mashup editor (they’ll even host your mashups for you) and a new version of the Google Web Toolkit (a million users and counting).
Real shame Gears doesn’t work on Opera, but it’s open source, so maybe someone in the community will correct Google’s ommission. Might even get me to start using Reader. I hear Reader actually runs faster offline than on.
Michael Gartenberg says he’s been experiencing some pretty serious bugs with Gears.
How about a Google Gears plugin for Wordpress? Blog editing software is all well and good, but a Gears version for editing your own blog in its normal environment while offline would be just peachy.
Google’s Aaron Boodman explains Gears:
