Google Gears

Posted on April 29, 2008 by voodooguru

I’m thankful to Julie in her Edublog for drawing my attention to Google Gears. It’s main usefulness at the moment seems to be that it allows editing of Google Documents while offline. Later when a connection is established to the Internet, the documents stored on the computer are synchronized with the web-based versions. It is browser specific so if more than one browser is used, Google Gears needs to be installed on each browser. As Wikipedia says: Google Gears installs a browser extension that adds a JavaScript API that enables the browser scripts to access the local datastore.

At the moment, I’ve downloaded it and installed it on Firefox running under Windows Vista. I guess if Google Docs wants to compete with Microsoft Office, then it has to offer this offline functionality.

Julie has also informed us about the online spreadsheet EditGrid that works within the web browser and is competing against Google’s online spreadsheet that forms part of Google Documents.

Marvin has informed us about a new cross-platform blogging application for Facebook called Blog It by a company called Six Apart. Here is how the company describes its new offering:

We are excited to launch the first cross-platform blogging application for Facebook — Blog It Powered by TypePad. We think Blog It brings some of the best social aspects of Facebook to blogging, making it easy to blog from within Facebook and tell people you know all around the web that you’re doing so. It doesn’t matter if you blog using our products or not; we support bloggers on Blogger, LiveJournal, Movable Type, Pownce, Tumblr, TypePad, Twitter, Vox, WordPress.com and WordPress.org!