On Message with Ben Gross

At the recent Google Developer day, Google released offline functionality for Google Reader, it’s browser based feed aggregator. The offline functionality is enabled by Google Gears which “is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide offline functionality[.]” It’s an interesting technology that I’ll write more about at a later date.

You can install the Gears extension directly from a link on the Google Reader site. Once installed you can download the last 2000 messages into your browser for offline use. Embedded content such as YouTube videos are not available offline. Data is stored in the integrate SQLite database. Syncing is currently manual, but hopefully it will move to a background process. While the technology is still very new, existing users of Google Reader who wish to have access to their feeds offline will likely find this compelling. Gears is cross platform and cross browser. It is available for Firefox as well as Internet Explorer. Early adopters who use Safari with nightly builds of WebKit can also work with Gears.

Related posts


Link roundup for 9/10/07 Archive Sues to Recover 5 Million : The National Security Archive has sued the White House to obtain and require the preservation of over five million emails th ...

Link roundup for 3/21/08 YouTube Offline, Pakistan Telecom Blamed: A few weeks ago, YouTube was temporarily inaccessible to much of the world due routing tables changes from an ISP in P ...

Link roundup for 10/5/07 Adobe Raises The Stakes For Web Documents With Buzzword and Share: Erick Schonfeld at Techcrunch describes Adobe's plans to purchase Buzzword, Virtual Ubiquity' ...

 
close Reblog this comment
blog comments powered by Disqus

Home | White Papers | Privacy Practices | Contact Us

Copyright © 2008, Messaging News, Inc. All Rights Reserved.