Google Gears
Wow, G just launched Gears. They’re extensions (for Firefox and IE, for now - thankfully mac as well as PC) that provide web applications a means to work offline. Right now the biggie is Google Reader (their rss reader), but it doesn’t take a genius to imagine that Gmail and the Google Docs are already hard at work at this.
I wonder how this competes with Apollo, it’s obviously more limited, but it certainly gives people the ability to turn their online application into an offline one. With Flash’s ability to call out to javascript, I’m guessing that even flash apps will be able to take advantage of Gears.
It’s an early release and will hopefully get a little more full featured. The RSS reader is a great one - since you can just sync up your laptop with all your feeds and then be assured that you can read them whether or not you have access to the intertubes - and then when you do, you just resync and all your read/not read flags to Reader. It is super easy - when you’re in reader at the top right hand corner there’s a little green button that takes you into offline mode, you click it and it downloads all the posts to your machine and you are ready to go. You click the same button when you want to sync back to Reader.
The problem, at least I think it’s a problem, is that the syncing is dumb. That is, when I went offline on reader it dl’d 2000 posts, then I went back to online mode and then immediately offline again where it again said it was pulling 2000 posts. Ideally it wouldn’t have to do all that work again - I hope it doesn’t when Gmail gets the treatment. It’d also be cool if one could specify how much data you wanted, i.e. only the few hundred most recent, etc…
Obviously that’s kinda difficult to do for generic data, but who knows. I wouldn’t have thought you could make this happen with a firefox extension at all! At any rate, this is why Google keeps winning. Everything doesn’t have to be a platform, they can roll out small products and see how they do and then they figure out how to make things work together in a nice and seamless way. Very cool stuff.
