Bollyball

Google has recently come up with a revolutionary idea in the form of Google Gears. Google Gears is a simple 700K plug-in for Firefox 1.5+ and Internet Explorer 6+ that just extend your browser capability to work with web applications in the offline mode.

Well Google Gears can be downloaded from this link and it will work with your browser in three parts:

1. One part of it, deals with the creation and maintenance of the objects that are required to store Web applications for offline usage.
2. The second part is an SQL database that keeps all the information regarding the web site.
3. The last part is an asynchronous Javascript that allows you to synchronize your offline sessions with the online contents of the site.

The best part of Google Gears is that it is open to all developers so that they can use it with their web applications. So, this will lead to a number of web applications coming up in a very short time and will not just depend on Google to come up with applications supporting it. Google has made Google Reader compatible with Google Gears. That means you can now use Google Reader even it you are offline. Here are the steps on how to use Google Gears.

1. First of all you will have to install the Google Gear plug-in your computer. For this, you will have to visit the Google Gear page and click on the Download plug-in. Download the file and run it, it will start downloading the install files that are around 700KB and will install it.
2. Next, go to your Google Reader account page.
3. Once the Google Reader homepage gets loaded up into your browser, it will ask you for the permissions for Offline Sessions. Just click the "Yes" button there.
4. Now, go to your Google Reader account page and find a "Green Colored Arrow" on the top right side of the page just as shown.
5. Click on it and it will download the last 2000 messages in your account to your computer so that you can use Google Reader even when you are not online.

Currently, synchronization between offline and online sessions has to be done manually but once the idea gets more popular it is for sure that Google will come up with new ways so that synchronizing can be done automatically. Now those days are not far away when you don't have to connect to the internet in order to search for a keyword or to surf forums and post messages there or for using any other social networking sites.

Posted by saurabh on Thursday, May 31, 2007 at 10:55 AM | Permalink