Because geek is cool and clever

Gearing up for offline goodness June 7, 2007

The richness of today’s web browser experience makes it possible to do all sorts of things online that used to require extra software. Email, word processing, spreadsheeting, photo editing, calendars and to do lists, even relatively sophisticated gaming are all achievable within a browser.

Online applications have the huge advantage of being computer independent, allowing you to save and retrieve your documents and information from any internet-enabled PC, anywhere in the world.

But this advantage is, ironically, also the main disadvantage of creating and accessing your data over the internet. What happens when you are not connected?

A solution to this problem is being tackled by Google which has just released Google Gears (gears.google.com), an open source extension to web browsers which allows offline interaction and functionality with traditional online applications.

One of the first sites to use Google’s Gears technology is my favourite ‘To Do’ website, Remember The Milk (RTM).

RTM now offers an ‘offline mode’ which, it promises, lets you do all the things that you’d normally do online without that all important connection. As soon as you go back online again, any changes or additions you have made to your tasks and notes are synchronised.

This is a very exciting project which I shall be eagerly following.