I logged on to Google Reader to catchup on the latest technology news and saw a shiny, "New" link. Of course since I like anything labeled as "new" (especially from Google) I decided to click it.
Google officially released Google Gears, a browser plugin that enables offline web applications. Once you've installed Google Gears, you can download your latest 2,000 items so they're available even when you don't have an internet connection.
Google Gears is an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline. Gears provides three key features:
- A local server, to cache and serve application resources (HTML, JavaScript, images, etc.) without needing to contact a server
- A database, to store and access data from within the browser
- A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background
Like everything else with Google this is a “developer release” and they are asking for feedback. Google have also made Google Gears available to developers to write their own offline applications utilzing the API. Perhaps when I find some free time (yeah right!) I’ll look at it closer. They have a number of sample application to get up and running quickly.
