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Happy Birthday Google Gears!

hebbet [PersonRank 10]

Wednesday, May 28, 2008
16 years ago4,464 views

<<It has been a year since the launch of Google Gears, and we wanted to offer a glimpse into what's changing, and what's ahead.

First of all, to better reflect the open nature of this project, we've decided to rename ourselves. Henceforth, the project will be simply "Gears." We want to make it clear that Gears isn't just a Google thing. We see Gears as a way for everyone to get involved with upgrading the web platform.>>

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/happy-birthday-google-gears.html

Philipp Lenssen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Why not go all the way and call it OpenGears ;)

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Gears' birthday is on May 31st ;)

James Xuan [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

A year already? Wow and still now very well deployed :-S

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Best example : allowing to edit documents of Google Docs offline, but not to create them. Yeah...

Haochi [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I thought the best examples are Remember the Milk & Zoho Office. (not a user of any of the two)

Hong Xiaowan [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I remember 07 2006 had a Google Gears Plugin for Wordpress. Now Wordpress 2.5+Google Gears=Wordpress 2.6 official.

Hong Xiaowan [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Sorry, please change to 06 2007

Hong Xiaowan [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Also, Myspace join Google Gears, it should be a special news like Google OpenSocial.

Ben Allen [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I think offline Myspace mail will be big. Masses of people use that instead of regular email.

TOMHTML [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Today is Google Sitemaps' birthday (2 years old).
Nobody wrote about that.
Nobody cares about that.
As nobody should care about Gears' birthday.
But that event for Gears generated thousands of comments worldwide.

Life sucks for products that are not highlighted by Google marketing teams...

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

The quote posted by hebbet (at the top of this page) refers to Google's statement that Gears is not just a Google thing, but a way of "upgrading the web platform".

Is anyone able to put into simple words what Google is saying here? Is there more to Gears than an attempt to smooth over the differences between offline and online working?

Mrrix32 [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

I think what they mean by <<Not just a Google thing>> is that it can be used for any site not just Google Reader/Docs. Which is why they say they're <<Upgrading the web platform>> as it can be used across the whole of the Internet

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

<< Is there more to Gears than an attempt to smooth over the differences between offline and online working? >>

Yes, Gears is not about making web apps work offline, is about having more powerful browsers.

http://almaer.com/blog/google-gears-upgrading-from-a-1950s-chevy-in-cuba
http://almaer.com/blog/gears-as-a-bleeding-edge-html-5-implementation

Roger Browne [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

OK, so is the following explanation fair or unfair?

" Gears is a browser plug-in which provides some useful APIs that can be used by Google and others. Looking towards the future, it "will not have exactly the same implementation of HTML 5 as others"[1] but who cares because Gears is auto-updating. If we can get enough apps to depend on Gears, then Gears will become the de-facto web app API and we won't have to worry about pesky standards bodies in the future. "

[1] http://almaer.com/blog/gears-as-a-bleeding-edge-html-5-implementation

Maybe I'm totally missing the point, but is there any way in which Gears is fundamentally different from any other web-accessible API (Flash, Java, .NET, YUI, etc)?

Ionut Alex. Chitu [PersonRank 10]

16 years ago #

Here's a post about Gears vs AIR:
http://almaer.com/blog/gears-and-air-the-open-source-difference

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