In the first week of June Google launched a program called “Google Gears” that expands the already impressive capabilities of Google Reader (Google’s free news reader) to allow offline viewing. Here is a quote from Google’s related blog posting:
“Now, you can read these updates whether you’re on or offline. It’s easy to read today’s financial news from the </span>New York Times on the train, or catch up on your favorite blog while on a plane 35,000 ft. above the Atlantic.</span>
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.”</span>
I can’t believe I missed this piece of news. I am an avid user of this program but I have always found it sad that I couldn’t use it without an Internet connection… now we all can. Great work Google!!
What is Google Gears?
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Google Gears is a new open source browser extension that allows developers to create web applications that also extend to offline use. Gears provides three key features according to the Google Gears FAQ:
- 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
<span>A worker thread pool, to make web applications more responsive by performing expensive operations in the background</span>
Above that description the details are beyond me but more information is available here. It definitely sounds like a very useful initiative.
PS. they note within the blog post that because this is a developer release there are likely to be some bugs in the short term.
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