GoogleGears posts

We already knew Google Gears was on its way out, but Google has now basically lowered the casket into the ground. Gears powered a bunch of web apps in its day, but now Google's stopping work on it and switching to supporting its features natively in Chrome using HTML5 and other emerging web standards.

What does this mean for current Gears users? Well, support will be severely limited, but maintained until there's a way to port entire apps (including their userbases) to a standards-based approach. Some Gears APIs have already popped up natively in Chrome, which now includes geolocation and several database-related APIs.

Check out Google's blog post for the skinny on what is and isn't supported so far. If you're a developer using Gears, you can also take advantage of Google's invitation to reach out and ask questions about the future of the Gears features your apps use.

Google Gears has been pushing web applications forward since 2007, allowing them to use local data and run offline. Although Gears is still relevant, Google has announced plans to let it fade away in favor of emerging HTML5 features that do the same things. The big difference is that HTML5 will be universal, and won't require Google to offer support and ensure compatibility.

Google told the LA Times "We are excited that much of the technology in Gears, including offline support and geolocation APIs, are being incorporated into the HTML5 spec as an open standard supported across browsers, and see that as the logical next step for developers looking to include these features in their websites." There are still some issues, though, because HTML5 is still far from universally-adopted, and Google isn't supporting Gears for some browsers. Even Google's own Chrome doesn't work with Gears on a Mac.

Google will continue keeping Gears up and running so that existing users don't experience problems, but it's encouraging developers to choose HTML5 in the future.

[via VentureBeat]

If, like me, you've become fairly reliant on Google Gears, the browser plug-in from Google that allows sites to save data for offline access, the release of Firefox 3.5 is probably frustrating you. For some reason, Google isn't on the ball, even though the impending Firefox release was available for aeons in beta.

Luckily, for those of you that are brave (or dumb) enough to install an unofficial version of the Google Gears Firefox extension, you can get your Google Gears goodness going in Firefox 3.5 right now. Lifehacker points us to the unofficial Gears download locations for Windows & Linux, and Mac OS X (Intel only), but had only tested the Windows version at the time they posted about it. I can report that I'm dumb enough to install an unofficial Gears build, and it has so far worked flawlessly on my Mac. I use Gears regularly with Gmail, GCal, GReader, and WordPress, and all are working as expected.

Hopefully Google will hurry up and release an official Gears release for Firefox 3.5, but for now I've got a solution that works. Do you use Gears? If so, do you rely on it? What sites do you use it with?

Yea, verily, Google brought Gears to Gmail today, meaning you can (finally) go through downloaded emails without a handy internet connection. There are caveats: spellcheck won't work, can't add attachments, pretty much anything that would require a connection won't be there. Reading, responding, starring and labeling do work, however, which is very cool. But hey, don't take my word for it. See the pretty movie Google made to explain it all below.


UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments, this is US and UK only (for now). Also, I should point out that you'll find the feature in Gmail labs -- it isn't yet part of the standard feature set. Google states users should see this by the end of the week.

Via TechCrunch

Only a few months after its last major release, the WordPress crew has just unleashed WordPress 2.6 into the wild. While the changes with this update aren't as visually sweeping as those ushered in with 2.5, but they do add some great new options and optimizations. WordPress encourages users to upgrade, as the old 2.5 branch will no-longer be maintained, and they have outlined the upgrade process here or you can use the fantastic automatic-update plugin.

We've been playing around with 2.6 on our local installs since the first beta was released, and we think this is a very, very solid release.

The WordPress team posted video showing off some of the new features:



Read on for our take on the new WordPress!

Welcome to Googleholic - your bi-weekly fix of everything Google! In this edition:

• Google Gears gets some updates
• YouTube introduces Living Legends
• Google Analytics adds new graphing options
• Google to lay off ~300 DoubleClick employees and sell Performics Search Marketing

We've written about personal finance sites like Mint and Spendview before, but Buxfer has a few interesting features that differentiate it from the others. While it offers auto-syncing of transaction information with your banks and credit cards, budgeting, and expense analysis, Buxfer also has three key characteristics:

1. Shared Finances - Buxfer allows you to create groups and assign specific finances to those groups to monitor who owes or receives money. For example, you could create a "Cable Bill" group and assign yourself and your roommates to the group to track who has forked over the cash for the Super Deluxe Sports Package.
2. Google Gears - By using Buxfer's Google Gears support, you can keep all of your private financial data on your own computer, instead of Buxfer's servers. The other personal finance sites store your information on their servers, thus out of your control.
3. Mobile Access - Buxfer has a mobile phone interface and an iPhone-specific interface for accessing your account remotely. You can also use Twitter or SMS to get account balances or to be notified of low balances, large withdrawals, etc.
   

Due to data security concerns, many people don't want to give their financial account information to third parties. However, account aggregation services like Buxfer can potentially create better security by creating higher, more efficient data availability. Not everyone is vigilant enough to login to every specific bank and credit card website every day to check account balances and check for fraud. However, by logging into a personal finance site, you can check the balances of all of our accounts in a few seconds which may make keeping tabs on your financial well-being a bit easier.

[Via VentureBeat]

Online office suites seem to be all the rage these days. ThinkFree, Zoho, and Google all have word processing and spreadsheet applications that you can access from any computer with an internet connected web browser. But what do you do when you're taking your laptop on a plane or train where there's no Wi-Fi signal?

Zoho has just announced the ability to access Zoho Writer documents offline.



The funny thing is that Zoho has enabled offline reading using Google Gears. Google, on the other hand still doesn't haven an offline mode for its Docs & Spreadsheets office suite.

For now, you can read Zoho documents offline, but you can't write them. Zoho plans to add full read/write/synchronization capabilities within the next few weeks.

[via Read/WriteWeb]

Well, that was fast. Google Gears hasn't even been announced yet, and already Google Reader users can install it and wallow in the splendor that is offline reading. Yep, Google Reader now offers the ability to download the 2000 most recent unread posts, so that you can read them when not connected to the internet.

The link shows up as a single innocuous red word, "offline", at the top right of your Google Reader screen. Clicking on it takes you to a page where you are invited to install the beta of Google Gears. So far we've only tested it on a Mac with BonEcho (a Mac-specific version of Firefox), and it works great. Since Google Gears is going to be available for all major platforms, we can assume this will work just as well on Windows.

Now the wait for what we're drooling after: Offline Gmail. Please, Google? Pretty-please?!