Google announced last week Google Gears for Mobile (or specifically, Windows Mobile), bringing its promise to offline phone applications, even as the promises of Gears for computers has still not been realized. You can check out Gears Mobile here or watch this video:
Web-based office suite Zoho and personal finance site Buxfer are the first to use Gears Mobile (yes, not even Google’s products support this yet). Considering the lack of progress getting web apps to use Google Gears, especially the dissapointing support for Google’s own products, it’s amazing there’s already a mobile version before there’s, say, a Gmail version. It’s nice that, for once, Google is supporting Windows Mobile first, but considering the myriad of phone platforms not supported, and the many online apps not supported, it’s little more than “nice”.
Anyone want to bet that Gears for Windows Mobile is mostly just a developer platform in order to have Gears-supporting apps ready to run on Android, whenever Android happens?
The holidays have not been kind to me, or to this blog, and I apologize. Here are all the stories left lying around that aren’t going to get a full post:
Google Files Patent For Text Recognition In Images
It is now being reported that back in June, Google filed a patent for a machine recognizing the text in images, a very useful technology for Google Image Search, Google Shopping, signs in Google Maps Street View, and other Google products. Three days before Google filed for it, Microsoft filed for a very similar patent that includes many of the elements of the Google patent. If the patents are similar enough, it’s Microsoft’s patent that’s going to get passed, since it was first, so Google might have something to be worried about.
YouTube Brings Back Science & Technology Category
Shortly after retiring the Science & Technology category, YouTube has brought it back, reportedly after complaints from tech bloggers that they had no place to put their videos.
Google Builds Spectrum War Room Forbes reports that Google has set up a war room for planning its strategy for this month’s FCC wireless spectrum auction. The company is consulting with game theorists and auction experts, hoping to figure out what the competition is planning to bid in order to win the auction.
gOS 2.0 Coming At CES
Everex, makers of the Green Operating System that is often referred to as a Google Operating System, plan to release version 2 at the Consumer Electronics Show next week. The new version will include Google Gears integration, the better to run Google programs while offline. The system is extremely reliant on online apps as programs on it, and Gears is the best way to bridge the desktop and the browser.
Don’t be shocked if gOS is the number one Linux distribution in the world by the end of the year. With Wal-Mart backing it, it should be easy.
Baidu CFO Dies During Christmas Vacation
The Chief Financial Officer of Baidu, China’s premier internet search engine, died while on vacation last week. CFO Shawn Wang died under circumstances that have not been revealed to the media, but Baidu’s stock, normally a high performer, has slipped almost 5% in the week since, due to uncertainty over the company’s financial future.
Jotspot’s former VP of Product Development and current Googler Scott Johnston gave a presentation last week where he revealed much of Google’s plans for JotSpot. Turns out the collaboration software will be the basis for Google Sites, the replacement for Google Page Creator, using powerful collaborative tools to allow businesses to create “intranets, project management tracking, customer extranets, and any number of custom sites”.
Scott also confirmed what most people had been suspecting, that Google Gears support will be built into Google Docs, Gmail and Calendar for offline access. He explained how offline and online collaborative editing of the same document would be reconciled.
What happens when somebody edits a document offline at the same time another user is editing the online version? The same algorithm that reconciles simultaneous editing will apply here when the offline version is merged back into the online version. Changes will be versioned the same way, so basically in chronological order.
Google is also apparently not yet working on OCR (optical character recognition) for imported files (Microsoft Office’s OneNote does this), but may one day. Integrating GrandCentral into Google Apps is a major priority for Google, he said. And finally, don’t expect video conferencing in Google Talk/Chat, not soon at least, though it may be considered for the long term.
GearsMonkey is a project on Google Code that uses the Greasemonkey scripting plugin to add Google Gears support to any website. The current code will let you take Wikipedia offline, letting you read the web encyclopedia offline, but with some coding skills you can modify the code to take practically any website offline.
(via Lifehacker)
Google seems content to continue leaving the job of adapting sites for Gears to others, which makes sense given the incredible amount of work it would take to do everything itself. Still, the strategy isn’t working, with very few sites supporting Gears, so maybe Google needs to get a little more aggressive.
Google Gears, Google’s platform for running online applications while not connected to the internet, has been a ton of potential that wasn’t being realized, since Google launched it with Google Reader and then did nothing for five months. For Gears to be successful, it has to be more useful than a one-app pony, and Google wasn’t using it for anything.
Things have improved a bit, with two more Google products getting Gears functionality. Blogger can be made to work with Gears, thanks to some sample code whipped up by the Gears team using the new Blogger GData JavaScript library. They haven’t actually integrated with Gears, just shown a way other developers can build an integration, which might mean that the Gears team doesn’t have the time or resources to do full-fledged solutions.
The other service which is getting actual Gears integration is Google Calendar, as spotted by Andy Beal. Some slueths at Blogoscoped discovered you will be able to view and edit the next three months of your calendar after a Gears-enabled browser logs onto Calendar and syncs up. Presumably, you’ll be able to view a decent number of past appointments as well. No idea when this functionality goes live, but its promising.
I’m going to go speculating and say that it appears Google has decided to leave the job of integrating Gears with the various Google services to the actual product teams, which could be why its taking so long. Most Google teams have a lot of work on their plates, and might not have time to do this. I can’t imagine the Google Docs guys having a lot of time, with the high visibility and pressure of their products, which is a shame since Docs (and Gmail) are the most anticipated products to get Gears eventually.
Finally, another smart online application has enabled support for Google Gears, Google’s platform for offline access for online apps. This time it’s Zoho, a web-based office suite, and direct competitor to Google’s Docs platform (ironic, because Docs could really use Gears support, but it doesn’t have it yet). So far, it’s very simplistic, with a “Go offline” button triggering the download of 15 documents to your PC for read-only access, but at least it’s a start.
Aaron Boodman, a Google Gears developer, put together a dead-simple Gears application to show how easy it is to create one. Go to GearPad, enter a username and password, and you have a notepad that works whether you have an internet connection or not. Sure, Notepad in Windows works offline, but you can get you GearPad notebook that you wrote at work when you get home. If you need a real simple way to store and send yourself some text, and understand that emailing yourself is a stupid solution 99% of the time, check it out.
(via LifeHacker)
Google really needs to central control panel for Gears, so I can tell it to update all my Gears apps with a single click before I go offline, and manage my Gears permissions. Most importantly, direct links to my Gears apps, so I can load them offline without writing down all the URLs.
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.
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.
