Google has released a new extension called Google Gears for both Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6.0+. The extension itself won’t do you any good. But with application like Google Reader, which already utilizes Gears’ API, will let you to take your data offline – in case of Google Reader, it means you can read your latest feeds (2000 items) without any Internet connection. This is such a great news for users.
For developers, it means that you can use Google Gear’s APIs to develop web applications with offline functionality:
Google Gears (BETA) is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality using following JavaScript APIs:
- Store and serve application resources locally
- Store data locally in a fully-searchable relational database
- Run asynchronous Javascript to improve application responsiveness
Great work there, Google. Now please release a new version of Gmail, Google Docs and Gcal with offline functionality, soon.
Any other web applications (Google, or non-Google) would be cool to have this offline functionality? Comment them below!
[...] still in beta but Google Reader already supports it by allowing you to download up to 2000 items to read offline. This could be useful when I’m [...]
Oh wow, I would love to have Google Docs with an offline capability.
My co-author and I are writing a book using Google Docs (formerly Writely) and it is super-useful in many ways, especially with the collaborative editing features. We can both be in the document at the same time and we can see each other’s edits almost real-time.
However, the fact that I can’t get to the documents offline (like on an airplane) is a serious problem. I would love to see Google use Gears to resolve that.
[...] Google Gears powers Reader with Offline Function – lifehack.org [...]
Remember The Milk (http://www.rememberthemilk.com) uses this.