Jeff Lail

I’ve found myself wanting to do work or stay in touch a lot lately in places where the internet connectivity is poor at best.  I was exciting to find out about Google Gears and all the features that this little program can add to my life.

The Google Gears software is fairly integrated into Google products.  The idea behind Google Gears is to make your Google applications (as well as some others) available when you do not have available internet.

Your first question should be “but wait, isn’t google a web-based application”.  This is the genius behind Google Gears.   Google Gears works as a kind of operating/storage system that allows you to synch online content with your computer.  This allows the computer to be able to open these applications at any time and any place.

The first one I experimented with was Google Reader.  The internet in my apartment complex is rather flighty and unreliable, and I wanted to have a place that I could sort through the blogs that I was reading for the day and be able to read them without worrying about if the internet was going to cut out during the middle of reading.

The Gears related reader application is fairly simple.  When you open reader, a small circle with an arrow in it will appear beside your login name (probably your email).  When you click on that, it will download the available unread blog posts that you have in your reader.  When it is completed, you will be able to view this content whether you are online or not.  For some reason, this always says “downloading 2000 items” when you synch the folder.  I’m not sure what this means, it could be Y2K related for all I know, but it says this whether you’re downloading 20 blogs posts or 300.

I’m currently experimenting with the Google Docs version of the Gears software.  I will post on here when I feel a little more comfortable how it works.  But if it works, it’s basically making the entire google suite of word processing, spreadsheets, powerpoints, and forms available at all times.  Sounds like a shot at Microsoft to me.