I know it’s a bit late to unveil the news that Google has published yet another great tool to you, since you’ll probably already heard it about ten times until now (2 days too late and it’s old news, I sometimes hate the internet…). Now all of you (probably no one at all) will be waiting for my personal point of view in this matter. At first I was pretty excited (hell I even made about 10 screenshots just to show them in my next blog post), and even more when I found out that Google Gears is already used in a bunch on non-Google applications too (RememberTheMilk being my personal favorite for now). But the excitement soon wore off, sure taking my stuff offline and being able to manipulate my wonderful Ajaxified applications is a great proof of concept, but when will I ever use it? What I mean by this is that, yes you can take the data offline, but you can’t yet take the interface offline, so you have to open the application, synchronize your data to use it offline, then switch to offline mode (which basically means you put your Notebook in suspend mode, and then resume when you don’t have network (think Plane), don’t ever even think about closing your browser because you won’t be able to get back! And what’s even worse you can’t access linked information either, which is bad since I really enjoy having some flick(r) through my Flickr-Feeds and look what my friends and contacts did last weekend.

My verdict: really impressive stuff, but please make something similar to load pages/interfaces from the cache.

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