gHacks technology news » google gears

Google Calendar Offline released

Daniel Pataki — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 13:42:37 +0000

While taking a look at my calendar today I noticed that Google has rolled out their offline feture for Google Calendar, and after some searching I found that this is indeed the case for everyone. Since we have become so reliant on the web for everything this should come in handy for times when your router suddenly gives up, or when you’re on the train, trying to take a look at your events.

To enable this feature you will need Google Gears, which will download some stuff for you, then off you go, you can view your calendar offline. Sadly you can only view your calendar at the moment, you won’t be able to edit or add events. I imagine they will be adding this soon, I would think this only requires some simple syncing.

Until then, you have full viewing access to your calendar, and you can use Google Gears with many sites, like Remember The Milk, Google Reader, Zoho Writer, and more. Do you know any other cool sites that work with Google Gears? Let us know, perhaps in the future we can download the whole internet and use it at home!

Tags: calendar, google gears, offline

Offline Gmail Buzz

Martin — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:11:18 +0000

It seems that the experimental Gmail application that is available for US and UK Gmail users has been creating some buzz on the Internet. It basically allows users to use Gmail while they are offline, meaning not connected to the Internet. It makes use of Google Gears and can be activated in the Gmail interface by clicking on Settings and then the Labs section. Once activated a local copy of the mail folders will be stored on the computer which will be accessed whenever there is no Internet connection. The user can access all mails received or send and compose new mails. The changes will be synchronized with Gmail once the Internet connection becomes available again.

Offline Gmail is an interesting option for users who do not want to (or cannot) install a desktop client on their computer. Everyone else is probably better of using desktop clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook or The Bat which provide many advanced features and usage scenarios that web email clients do not offer.

It should also be noted that Google Gears has to be installed on the computer to make use of the offline Gmail extension. Google Gears is currently only available for Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Is the buzz about the new experimental Gmail feature justified? It is highly limited at this point in time and does not come with any features that cannot be achieved otherwise. It might be nice for users who like to use Gmail and do not want the troubles of installing a desktop email client. What’s your take on it?

Tags: desktop email, email client, gmail, gmail offline, google gears, google-mail, offline email, offline gmail

Desktop Apps with Bubble

joshua — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 07:58:01 +0000

I must admit I had never heard of Bubbles before I tried out the time tracking service SlimTimer.

Bubbles is a Windows only ‘browser’ which lets you create site specific ‘bubbles’ to run in the system tray.

It can actually be very useful for any web service you find yourself constantly using, but as of yet has no kind of desktop access. SlimTimer was designed to take advantage of it specifically, but it works pretty well with a lot of other websites as well.

Really it’s just the fact you can minimise these ‘bubbles’ to the system tray which makes it useful for me, if it wasn’t for that then you can get a lot of the functionality through other means.

The problem is a lot of the Bubbles functionality overlaps what other programs I use already do, but that might not be the case for you.

It does have some useful extensions such as notifications for Google services like Google Reader, Gmail and Facebook. You can also drag and drop photos to be uploaded to Flickr, a handy one if this is a service you use.

Personally I don’t know how this is going to compete against technologies such as Adobe AIR and Google Gears and maybe even Mozilla Prism. However the simplicity of Bubbles may be its strong point, and plenty of developer tools and resources are provided on the site.

Do any of you use this?

Tags: adobe air, bubbles, facebook, gmail, google gears, site, specific

Google Gears for Flock

joshua — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:49:23 +0000

Last week I suggested you give the new Flock 1.2 a try, and I don’t know if any of you would have… but if you do use Flock then I’ve found one extremely handy extension.

~~Google~~ Gears is one year old now, and although we haven’t seen a huge adoption across the web, it is extremely useful if you use any of the Google services likes Docs, Reader, Calendar and Gmail.

I’m finding myself using Docs increasingly over the last few weeks and I really need access to my files offline, unfortunately Google Gears is officially only available for Internet Explorer and Firefox. I presumed the Firefox extension would work for Flock as it’s built on the Firefox code base, but for some reason it doesn’t.

Luckily a quick Google later and I found Martin over at capcloud discovered converting the Firefox Gears extensions into a Flock extension to be fairly simple:

Following the instructions that I found on the Google Gears Google Group, I repackaged Google Gears as a Flock extension. (The only other converted Gears extension that I found seems to be for OS X.)

You can install the extension by clicking here.

Once you have downloaded this simply use Flock to open the file and it should install just like a normal extension.

Martin only just updated this on April the 24th, so there should be no reason for it not to work.

Hope you find it useful!

Tags: flock, gears, Google, google gears

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