Web sites that work offline thanks to Google Gears

Posted on December 11, 2007 at 9:16 am

If you haven’t heard already, the next big thing in web computing is going to be web apps that let you work online and offline without a hitch! Take, for example, an online calendar application like Google Calendar. Right now, you have to be connected to the Internet to use it, to add appointments, etc.

However, in the near future, you will be able to disconnect your laptop from the Internet, add contacts, appointments, etc and when you get back online, all of your changes will be synched with the online version.

The way that’s going to happen is through a free add-on from Google for IE or Firefox called Google Gears.

Google Gears was launched in May of 2007, but has been slow to be incorporated into many of our favorite web 2.0 sites. You would think Google would be one top of the game and have all of their own applications running on Google Gears, but we’re still waiting for this to happen with Google Calendar, Gmail, and Google Docs.

Luckily, there are a couple of other web sites out there that have started using Google Gears with their sites to give them a head start over their competition and give us the ability to work offline!

	One application from Google that works offline is Google Reader. When you go offline, Google Reader will download all new items from your RSS feeds, minus the images. Everything you read offline will be marked as read, just like normal!

	Zoho has beat everyone to the punch and is the first online office suite to be able to work offline with their word processor. You can access documents and edit them offline!

	One of my favorite sites out there, Remember the Milk now lets you work offline with your lists. You can do everything you can do online: add tasks, delete tasks, change dates, etc and everything will be updated when you come online.

	PassPack is a cool site that you can use to store all of your passwords online. However, it’s quite useless unless you can access your stuff offline, which you can do now!

	MindMeister is a mind mapping web software. With Google Gears, you can create mind maps offline or edit existing ones.

That’s about it! Soon you should be able to use Google Calendar while you’re offline too! Eventually, the line that separates desktop apps from web apps will no longer be a line! Hopefully, there will be a online image editing tool that you can use while offline too!

After a point, I’m not sure if it’s going to be worth buying software anymore, everything will be free and work online or offline. Cool! Enjoy!

Source via DigitalInspiration

[tags]google gears, work offline, work without internet connection, offline web apps[/tags]

» Filed Under Cool Websites

Comments

3 Responses to “Web sites that work offline thanks to Google Gears”

FileMaker Plugin said on : April 20th, 2008 at 6:29 am

You can now add Google Docs to that list!

EduLinks - About time too… « TheUniversityBlog Says:

[...] Online Tech Tips – Web sites that work offline thanks to Google Gears [...]
December 12th, 2007 at 8:42 pm
Offline Gmail using Google Gears Says:

[...] December 2007 we have wrote about websites that work offline thanks to Google Gears. Now we will explore a very significant development from Google Gears for GMail. You read it [...]
February 3rd, 2009 at 5:27 am