Web applications like Gmail and the 30 Boxes calendar are great. You can access them from any net-connected computer. You don’t have to worry about backing up your data. Installing upgrades to the software is someone else’s job. It doesn’t even matter which operating system you’re running.
One thing you couldn’t do until now was work with your web apps and data offline. Google Gears changes that. Even better, it’s not just for Google’s own apps.
Google’s first app to use Gears is Google Reader, its RSS and Atom feed reader. Without Gears, this works in the usual way you’d expect for a web app: log in from any connected computer and you can read your subscribed feeds in the browser. It’s not working with Gmail or Google Calendar just yet, but they can’t be far behind.
Gears installs as an extension for Internet Explorer and Firefox, and runs on Windows, OS X and Linux.
Looking at Reader with Gears installed, there’s a small green down arrow in the top-right corner of the page. This means you’re working online.
To go offline, just click the arrow and it’ll start to download the 2000 most recent items from your feed to a database that Gears has installed on your computer. You’ll see a progress bar in a small window.
Once it’s done, the arrow will be grey and pointing up. Now you’re in offline mode.
That’s it. Carry on working as before, reading your feeds. Of course, if you’re disconnected from the net, it’s not going to be very useful if you’re reading feeds that only carry item headlines and summaries, but that’s not a problem Gears is designed to solve.
When you get back to civilisation, click the arrow again and the changes you’ve made in the app (in this case, feed items marked as read) will be synchronised back with the server as if you’d never been away.
Gears doesn’t automatically make any web app work offline. Developers have to change their code to use it. That said the API and code is open source under the New BSD license, so all developers are welcome to explore.
Gears is a fundamental improvement in the usefulness of web apps and really shifts the balance of power between desktop and web-based apps. I’ll be looking at the technical nuts and bolts of how it works under the hood in a future article, but for now, have a play with the web app future. The first two live apps using Gears are Google Reader and the to-do list app Remember the Milk. They won’t be the last.
