Google Gears

This was touted as Google going straight at Microsoft. A framework for going off-line with on-line apps, called Google Gears. It appears that Google Reader and other apps are going to be outfitted with this capability, which is very cool.

One of the most frequently requested features for Google's web applications is the ability to use them offline. Unfortunately, today's web browsers lack some fundamental building blocks necessary to make offline web applications a reality. In other words, we found we needed to add a few new gears to the web machinery before we could get our apps to run offline. Gears is a browser extension that we hope -- with time and plenty of input and collaboration from outside of Google -- can make not just our applications but everyone's applications work offline.

Too many irons in the fire to play with this now, but I'll file it away, sort of today's mini-buzz after yesterday's MSoft Surface Computer wave. I'm also catching that people are complaining about the Google Street View, check out Boing Boing for the blowback on that!

update: Here's another article on Gears.