Spaced Out ::

I’ve just been tinkering with Google Gears. OK, so it’s old (ish) news (a month is a long time in IT), but I’ve had other things to do. Anyway, Google Gears is the first step in offering online apps, offline. For example, Google offer a pretty reasonable RSS aggregator called Google Reader. After Google Gears is installed, navigating to the Reader page will bring up a dialogue asking if you want to run this locally. If you do, all the feeds are downloaded to your machine for use when you are offline.

It’s a simple idea that’s been knocking around for a while and is really just the gradual progression of web technologies (and something, I gather, that will be offered, as a joint development effort, in Firefox 3).

It works under IE and Firefox on Windows, Mac and Linux. Unfortunately it comes as part of an installer, which is a pain because I wanted it to work with Portable Firefox. After a quick search, all you have to do is ZIP up the extension files in “C:\Program Files\Google\GoogleGears\Firefox” and then rename it to XPI. Drag and drop this straight in to Firefox and it will work fine. Neat solution.