Google has released an updated version of Google Gears that, unlike previous versions, supports Firefox 3.5. Gears lets you access some web applications in a browser even when you're offline. For example, you can download your reading list from Google Reader to read on a plane, or use Gmail to read and write email messages while you're offline. When you get back to an internet connection, Gears will send your messages or update your Google Reader or other settings.

Google Gears is available for Mac, Linux, and Windows. You can either grab the latest version from the download page or if you're an existing user you can grab it by using the Firefox add-ons "find updates" option.

[via CNET]

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?

GeeMail is a desktop client for Gmail based on Adobe AIR. In other words, it can run on Windows, Linux, or OS X as long as you have Adobe AIR installed. At its most basic level, GeeMail is a standalone application that you can use to check your email, send, or sort messages without opening a web browser.

But GeeMail also supports offline Gmail access. In other words, you can compose messages while you're away from an internet connection. When you go online again, GeeMail will send them. Google also provides limited offline support to users who install Google Gears.

GeeMail lacks a search box, which is a bit limiting. But what it does provide is super-fast access to your Gmail inxbox.

[via CNet]

Early last year some folks started finding clues that Google was building offline support for Google Calendar. Now it looks like the company is finally rolling out that feature.

Mark Mathson of Keenpath noticed an offline access button in his Google Calendar yesterday. As you would expect, the service uses Google Gears, which means you'll need to either install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer or use Google Chrome, which has it built in.

The feature isn't available for all users yet. But Google seems to be adding it to Google Apps user accounts first, which is unusual since the general public often gets access to new features before the Google Apps crowd.

To find out whether Google's ready to let you read your calendar offline, loging to your Google Calendar account and click the settings link. If you see a tab that says offline, you can configure your settings and download the data from Google Calendar to your desktop. This will let you view your calendar when you're not connected to the internet, and even create, delete, and edit appointments. When you connect to the internet again you can synchronize any changes you've made with the server.

Update: Google Calendar will only be available in read-only mode when you're offlinne. That's rather dissapointing.

[via Google Operating System]

Web based apps are the new desktop apps. There are web apps for playing games, watching videos, listening to music, creating and editing office documents, and the list goes on. While I still prefer editing audio, video, and images using dedicated desktop tools, there are even web apps for that.

But sometimes if all you want to do is access your email account or an online image editor like Picnik, you don't really need to fire up a full fledged web browser. A while back Mozilla created a project called Prism that lets you create a desktop shortcut that will open just a single page at a time in a stripped down version of Firefox. Now it looks like Mozilla is planning on integrating that feature with a future version of Firefox.

Here's how it would work. When you visit a web-based application, you'd be able to click a button to turn it into a desktop app. This would create a desktop shortcut to the application and users would be able to open a window showing just that app. For certain applications, like the Flickr Uploader or Zoho Docs, Firefox might allow you to drag and drop files to upload or create file associations in your operating system so that every time you click on a Word document, for example, Zoho Docs would be opened instead of Microsoft Word.

Right now these features are still in the planning stages. But we could see them in future versions of Firefox. Of course, Google Chrome already has a similar feature which lets you create an application shortcut out of any web page with a click of a button using Google Gears.

Online productivity app makers Zoho have publicly rolled out Zoho Mail, a webmail application that's been in private beta up until today. While the world may not really need yet another webmail app, there are a few things that make Zoho Mail a notable challenger to offerings from Google, Yaho!, Microsoft, and AOL.

First and foremost, Zoho Mail offers an offline mode thanks to Google Gears. If you have Gears installed for Internet Explorer or Firefox, you can configure Zoho to download your most recent email messages and attachments so you can catch up on your email when you're stranded somewhere without an internet connection. Yahoo! offers a similar feature, but despite the fact that Zoho Mail's offline access is powered by Google Gears, Google's Gmail does not have an offline mode... yet.

Zoho Mail also has a user-friendly interface that, like many other Zoho Office apps, feels more like a desktop application than a web app. You can sort messages by labels, Gmail-style. And there are a bunch of options for customizing your display. For example, you can open emails in a split-pane mode or in a pop-up window.

There's also a "send mail as" option that lets you change yoru reply to address. In other words, if you decide that you like Zoho Mail but don't want to bother letting everyone know that you have another new email address, you can just forward your old email account to Zoho Mail and change your Email ID so that nobody will ever know the difference.

How many of the applications you use on a daily basis are web-based as opposed to locally installed native applications? For me, the answer is way more than I ever would have expected.

Had you asked me this question a few years ago, I would have vehemently denied that the future of development is on the web. As much as I could see and understand the value of a ubiquitously available web-based application, there's just no way to approach the level of power and integration (not to mention the ability to be always-available) that is possible with well conceived and developed desktop software.

Of course, back then I didn't imagine that web applications could become as useful as Google Calendar or Remember the Milk. I also didn't imagine that light - yet still useful - versions of these apps would be available from my mobile phone almost wherever I was.

In fact, and much to my surprise, today most of my personal data today is tied up in online services: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Backpack, Remember the Milk, Facebook, Newsgator, and Evernote to name just a few.

Most of these are probably pretty familiar names, but one is a newcomer in the web space: Evernote. Still in beta, the new version of Evernote contains a full-featured web version, but synchronizes seamlessly with desktop software on either Windows or Mac platforms. And it's a breath of fresh air.

Google has developed a version of Picasa Web Albums optimized for Windows Mobile 6 devices. The update packs many of the features you can find in the iPhone version of Picasa Web Albums, including slideshows, search, and full image views.

The Windows Mobile version also makes use of the recently released Google Gears for Mobile to enable offline viewing of your web albums. You'll need to download and install Google Gears for this feature to work.

You can also add a Picasa icon to your Windows Mobile programs fodler so that you can launch Picasa Web Albums without firing up your web browser first.

In order to access the new Picasa Web Albums interface, just visit picasaweb.google.com using the mobile version of Internet Explorer on any touchscreen Windows Mobile 6 device.

[via My Today Screen]

Google is beginning to roll out offline functionality for Google Docs. What this means is that you can create documents online, share them with collaboraters, and make edits while you're nowhere near an internet connection. So, for example if you're on an airplane, you can work on a report, and as soon as you get back to your home or office, you just visit the Google Docs page again and all of your changes will sync up and your collaborators will see the latest version of the document.

If two people make changes offliine and then try to synchronize the same document with the server, Google should bring up a message letting you know about the conflict and asking which changes to keep.

You'll need to have Google Gears installed in order to use Google Docs offline. Google is doing a phased roll out, meaning that not all users will be able to access their documents offline right away. You should look for a little green arrow in the top navigation of Google Docs to see if you have access.

At first, users will only be able to access spreadsheets in read-only mode, but you'll have full edit capabilities for text documents. Presentation support will come in a few weeks.

Update: Google has posted an official announcement, including a video that will give you a better idea of what Google Docs offline looks like. (Here's a hint, it looks a lot like Google Docs online). Check out the video after the jump.

[via WebWare and Fast Company]

It looks like Google is preparing to add offline functionality to Google Calendar. A few days ago the folks at the Digital Streets blog noticed that Google seemed to have added some code to the Google Calendar page that would bring up a prompt to install Google Gears for access to 3 months worth of calendar data while you're offline. But once you install Google Gears, nothing happens.

The plot thickened on Thursday when Googlified noticed a new option in the settings section of Google Calendar. Go ahead and check, odds are you'll see an "Offline" tab in your own calendar settings. When you click the tab, you're told to download Google Gears. Unfortunately, once you install Google Gears, nothing seems to happen. Visiting Google Calendar with Gears installed just brings up the plain old Google Calendar with no option to save your data for offline viewing. But we get the feeling that Google wouldn't be adding features to the Google Calendar settings menu if the company didn't plan to activate those features soon.

Google has released a version of Google Gears that runs on Windows Mobile 5.0/6 devices. What does that mean? It means that you can access web applications like Zoho Writer or Buxfer on your mobile, even when you're offline. You'll need to go online at some point to synchronize your data, but once that's done you can open and view your documents while you're on the subway or on the ocean floor (the two places we're pretty sure there's on internet access available).

This is pretty big news for Windows Mobile uses who are tired of dealing with Office Mobile. Zoho's online office suite offers most of the features you'd want from a word processor. And it's free. Right now you can't edit Zoho Writer documents in offline mode, but Zoho plans to add that functionality soon.

In somewhat related news, Microsoft and Nokia have signed a deal to use Silverlight in some of its phone and internet tablets. Right now, Silverlight is primarily a platform for displaying rich media content on the web (like Adobe Flash), Microsoft eventually plans to add offline functionality to Silverlight (like Adobe AIR or Google Gears). That means we could see offline support for online applications coming to Nokia devices one day as well.

It's been about a year since Google acquired Wiki/page creation/collaboration/calendar/etc site JotSpot. And for most of that year, there's been a message at JotSpot.com saying that you can't sign up for a new account because Google is still integrating the service.

Blogger Andrew Miller reports that Google may be preparing to launch some new JotSpot-based services starting next year. Miller attended a presentation with Google's Scott Johnston, where Johnston outlined a bit of Google's strategy for integrating JotSpot tools with Google Apps.

First up, Google will launch Google Sites, an expanded version of Google Page Creator. The service will let businesses set up intranets, manage packages, and build custom sites.

Google is also beefing up its online office suite and has plans to let users edit documents, spreadsheets and presentations while offline using Google Gears. There will also be offline support for Google Calendar and Gmail. Google also plans to integrate GrandCentral, another recent purchase, with Google Apps.

[via TechCrunch]

Back in August Zoho added offline reading to Zoho Writer. While it's pretty cool that you can save online documents for reading when you're away from an internet connection, there was no way to edit those documents at the time.

Now Zoho is filling in the blanks by launching a full read/write capable version of Zoho Writer. That means when you mark a document for download you'll be able to read it, edit it, and synchronize it with your online documents when you go back online.

Of course, you could also just use a free word processor like OpenOffice Writer or AbiWord if you really just wanted to be able to edit documents offline. What makes online office suites cool is the ability to collaborate with other users. And Zoho Writer has that covered. Several different people can download the same document for editing and then synchronize their changes with the online version. Because Zoho lets you see the editing history of a document, it should be easy to see who made which changes.

[via VentureBeat]

Microsoft has launched a new technology that will allow developers to create offline versions of web applications. Microsoft posted a download link for Microsoft Sync Framework on Sunday.

It looks like this is Microsoft's answer to Google Gears, an online/offline data synchronization platform launched by Google earlier this year.

According to the download site, Microsoft Sync Framework will enable "collaboration and offline scenarios for applications, services and devices." That includes P2P synchronization of relational databases, NTFS/FAT file systems and all sorts of data ranging from contacts to music, videos, and user settings.

[via ZDnet]