Google Calendar Offline released

While taking a look at my calendar today, I noticed that Google has rolled out their offline feature 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!

Update: Google Gears has been discontinued in 2011 and while its code has been released as open source, it is not possible to use Gears for offline access of Google Calendar data anymore.

Google has implemented technology into its Chrome browser to enable offline access for Google Calendar. A support page highlights how offline access is enabled in the browser. You need to install the official Google Chrome Google Calendar extension that you find listed in the web store.

Once installed click on the Google Calendar icon in Chrome's toolbar, and when you are on the Calendar website, on the Gears icon again. Here you should either see a green icon with a checkmark next to offline, which indicates that all data is accessible offline, or a spinning icon which indicates that data is still being synchronized with the local computer system.

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