What's new with Google Gears? A Tech Talk

4/03/2008 03:31:00 PM
Posted by Dion Almaer, Gears Team

Brad Neuberg and Ben Lisbakken of the Gears team gave a brown bag talk on some of the new and interesting features in Gears.

They show a lot of examples and tools such as:

• PubTools: Brad developed this set of tools to enable offline caching of content in minutes. This is perfect if you have a set of content that you want to make available offline.


• Google Gears for Mobile: Just yesterday we launched our first Google mobile application using Gears, with Picasa


• Cross Domain Web Services: A good example using Flickr search


• Dojo Storage has just had a new release so it plays in the new Dojo 1.x land, and has a Gears storage engine


• blog.gears: Pamela Fox did a great job with this GData/Gears blogging application


• Gears + Greasemonkey = GearsMonkey

It is fun to hear some of the fellow Googlers probe with their own questions!



Brad and Ben will both be at Google I/O, May 28-29, 2008, in San Francisco. We are keen to hear your thoughts on Gears and the Open Web.

Gears Screencast: An Introductory Tutorial

3/31/2008 12:36:00 PM
Posted by Ben Lisbakken, Gears Team

Using a JavaScript API to cache web pages offline, interact with a client side database and introduce threading into your application isn't immediately intuitive because it's such a foreign concept for a web API. I remember when I was doing my first work with Gears -- I was a bit disoriented and in need of a walk through of how things work and why.

To help potential Gears users that feel like my 7-month-ago-self, I wrote a tutorial application that uses a minimal amount of non-Gears code. This application is a simple stock ticker that makes use of 5 of the Gears modules; LocalServer, Database, WorkerPool, Timer, and HTTPRequest.

But a standalone application can't teach someone -- it needs some explaining. Long articles generally lose my attention, so my media of choice was video. I made a screen cast where I walk through the code in three steps, which you can find here. There's also a zip file that contains the three steps of code so you can take a look at the code on your own. Please note that there is a PHP file that is required for the application to work, so you will need a server that runs PHP in order to use this code on your own!

Autodesk Labs: Project Draw Offline

2/01/2008 10:51:00 AM
Posted by Dion Almaer, Gears Team

David Falck and Shelly Mujtaba, members of Autodesk Labs, recently announced a new release of Project Draw that allows you to take your diagrams offline using Google Gears.

Project Draw is a browser based diagraming utility that lets you draw to your hearts content, without the need for plugins of any kind.

I got to meet David and Shelly, and we discussed their work, and experience with Google Gears.

They talked about how they are able to get a drawing experience that performs across browser, where it turns out they abstracted SVG and VML. They thought it would be a good idea to see a SVG Gear that made sure that SVG support was in the browsers that didn't support it natively, which is a good idea.

They also talked about how they did offline, and the difference between being offline, and being connected.

They actually used their own tool to create a state diagram of how Project Draw handles synchronization issues.



For example, they check the network in the application using code like this:

var netCheck = new NetworkDetection("ping.html");

netCheck.addEventListener("online", function(eAja){
 $("display").innerHTML = "";
 $("display").removeClassName("offline");
 this.connected = true;
});
netCheck.addEventListener("offline", function(eAja){
 $("display").innerHTML = "d\ni\ns\nc\no\nn\nn\ne\nc\nt\ne\nd";
 $("display").addClassName("offline");
 setHelp("You are disconnected from the Project Draw server.");
 this.connected = false;
});

Listen in to the chat below:



If you are working on an interesting Gears project, or know of one that we haven't covered, let us know in the comments!

Gearing up with Zoho Offline

8/23/2007 02:06:00 PM
Posted by Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

We were excited to hear that Zoho added Offline Support & Comments in Zoho Writer using Google Gears.

We met with Raju Vegesna and Sridhar Vembu, of the Zoho team, to talk about the announcement and ended up with the video chat that you see below which covers:

• The current implementation and interaction model in Zoho Writer Offline
• The architecture decisions around syncing, and read/write operations
• How they chose Google Gears
• How they are going to contribute to the project (They have some interesting functionality that may make sense to be in the core).

Thanks to the Zoho team, and we look forward to seeing what you come up with next!