Gears is an open source project that improves the Web browser by allowing web applications to interact naturally with your desktop, store data locally in a fully-searchable database, and run JavaScript in the background to improve performance.
Friday, April 24th, 2009
Category: Flash, Fun
, Gears
, UI
Marc Englund wrote to us about his recent experiments with mouse gestures and GWT: SimpleGesture is a GWT (and IT Mill Toolkit) implementation of the mouse gesture recognition method described by Didier Brun at bytearray.org (as I understand it). It allows you to register easy to understand (human readable) gestures, and receive events when these Read the rest…
Tuesday, January 27th, 2009
Category: Gears, Google
, Offline
Gmail Offline has been an incredibly long wished for product feature and now it is coming (takes time to push it out to people and it will appear in Settings – Labs). This is a big deal. It uses Gears of course, and many people are always saying “it’s about bloody time.” This is easy Read the rest…
Tuesday, January 20th, 2009
Category: Gears
Without Gears, it took about 23 seconds to unpack the tags. Versus just over 1 second for the same operation with Gears. What is that quote about? Passpack is a long time Gears user, but they have put out a new update that uses Gears in a better way. They use WorkerPools, and it really Read the rest…
Wednesday, January 14th, 2009
Category: Announcements, Aptana
, Gears
, Storage
Aptana has put out their first beta release of ActiveRecord.js. The details according to Ryan Johnson, a developer at Aptana: ActiveRecord.js is an open source object relational mapper (ORM) that supports multiple JavaScript environments, including: Google Gears (client-side persistence) In Memory (if no SQL server is available on the client) Adobe AIR (client-side persistence) SQLite Read the rest...
Thursday, August 28th, 2008
GWT has long had a project that aimed to give rich support for Google APIs called GALGWT, or "Google API Libraries for Google Web Toolkit". This project has stepped up to higher gear recently, and we have seen the GALGWT 1.0 release candidate appear. What is in GALGWT? The project is a collection of libraries Read the rest...
Wednesday, August 27th, 2008
Category: Gears
While we posted about the Gears 0.4 features a lot of the press only really talked about the Geolocation piece. I think that is important, and posted on that too, but Brad's piece discussed the full gamut including the Blob API, resummable HTTP, and Desktop API improvements to allow controlled file system access. The example Read the rest...
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
Category: Gears, Google
, JavaScript
, Mapping
, Standards
Last week I wrote a simple WhereAreYou? application that used the Google Ajax APIs ClientLocation API to access your location via your IP address. At the same time, we announced support for the Gears Geolocation API that can calculate your address using a GPS device, WiFi info, cell tower ids, and IP address lookups. Add Read the rest...
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
Category: Announcements, Gears
, Screencast
Hi folks, this is my first guest blog post here on Ajaxian. It's great to join the team. Gears, the open source browser plugin that teaches web browsers new tricks, has pushed out a new 0.4 release. Andrei Popescu from the Gears team lets us in on some of the nifty new features: We have Read the rest...
Friday, August 8th, 2008
Alx Dark has created The Tombs of Asciiroth a fully functional roguelike-meets-puzzle-arcade game. Asciiroth is a a complete, functional, open source game, written using GWT, and distributed either as an Adobe AIR application, or as a game you can play over the web. In the latter case, it uses Gears to provide saved game support. Read the rest...
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
Category: Dojo, Gears
, Interview
Brad Neuberg has built a very easy to use client side search tool called PubTools Search using Gears. The project is open source and provides a great avenue to share knowledge on Gears itself. To accompany the code, Brad wrote a detailed article: Did you know that you can use Gearsto do fast, client-side searching Read the rest...
Monday, July 14th, 2008
Category: Gears, JavaScript
, Podcasts
, Rails
, Ruby
With my Google hat on, I got to interview Michael Marcus and Rui Ma, two recent graduates from a masters program at NYU. They joined me to discuss Gears on Rails, their open source framework that makes it easier than ever to take a Rails code-base offline. They take the approach of giving you a Read the rest...
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
Category: Ajax, Gears
, Google
, GWT
, JavaScript
, Presentation
Some good stuff came out from my employer. First, we have the Gears 0.3 release which includes support for Firefox 3! I have been using it for awhile, and it has been great. The team wanted to get it out before the Firefox 3 launch (planned for June 17th). A plugin like Gears can get Read the rest...
Thursday, May 29th, 2008
Category: Gears
Chris Prince posted about Gears turning one year old. It was launched at last years Google Developer Day, and here we are at Google I/O a short year later. There was some fun news around Gears yesterday. Firstly, MySpace is using Gears to enable users to search their MySpace messages: One feature that they were Read the rest...
Category: Gears, Performance
Reposted from my personal techno.blog I was sitting on the tube a few months ago in London when I looked up to see Matt Mullenweg, Om Malik, and another nice chap whose name escapes me. A little random to bump into them in the middle of London, but we were all in town for the Read the rest...
Wednesday, May 28th, 2008
Category: Gears, Showcase
, UI
, Usability
One of the examples that Ben and I give in our State of Ajax talk at Google I/O today revolves around form history. We were thinking about the case for Undo on the Web that Aza Raskin is proposing and it got us thinking about the usage patterns of form data. An example that got Read the rest...
Thursday, May 8th, 2008
Category: Gears, JavaScript
I have talked before about the desire for a Notification API on the Web. As a Mac user, I would love to see Growl from JavaScript, and there have been libraries written from as far back as protoGrowl. The difference is between a JavaScript API that does notifications on the desktop, versus trying to get Read the rest...
Caching and dynamic views
My client does not want to change his cache settings on IE and I'm trying to figure out a way to dynamically update a view each time it is visited. I...
JQuery Function Not Defined?
In Episode 25, we chat about IE 8, standards, Acid3, server side JavaScript, and more.
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