Another piece of ‘Google Office’ starts moving into place.
We’ve said for a long time that the major problem with online versions of ‘Office’ programs is the assumption that an Internet connection is always available and at a reasonable price.
Enter ‘Google Gears’ an early, open-source project from Google to let web based programs continue to work without an Internet connection. Obviously this will make Google’s online programs a direct threat to Microsoft Office.
Google Gears allows developers to deal directly with files and a relational database stored on your own computer. Most web based programs (like Gmail) run with extremely sophisticated Javascript programs (a far cry from the few lines of Javascript found on many web sites). Google Gears is an additional library of services to extend Javascript. Web applications need to integrate Google Gears into their code before they will work offline.
Currently, Google Docs and Spreadsheets is mildly tolerant of an interrupted Internet connection but won’t work offline.
Google Gears is very much a ‘work in progress’ and doesn’t work with any of Google’s major programs – yet. At the moment you can download Google Gears from gears.google.com then try some of the examples on their developer site.
Security is a major concern for any system which allows a web page to interact with your local files. Google rightly warns users to be careful about the sites you allow to use Google Gears. In fact Gears has warning dialogs when you try to run a web page with it – quite separate to anything your browser might generate.
Google Gears works on Windows with IE v6 or higher plus Firefox 1.5 or above on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
Unless you’re a curious developer there’s not a lot to see with Google Gears, but come back in a few months and it’ll be a different story.
