Gears
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.
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
Category: Gears
, Prototype, Showcase
Buxfer is another personal finance site, a la Mint. Todd Ritter reports: Buxfer has a few interesting features that differentiate it from the others. While it offers auto-syncing of transaction information with your banks and credit cards, budgeting, and expense analysis, Buxfer also has three key characteristics: Shared Finances – Buxfer allows you to create Read the rest…
Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008
Category: Editorial, Gears, Google, JavaScript
Over on my personal blog I kicked off a series of articles on some future APIs that are on the table for Gears, and how in my opinion, Gears is mistakenly seen to be about "offline", when that is just the surface. I started off by discussing the Image Manipulation API, "is a module to Read the rest...
Thursday, December 27th, 2007
Category: Ajax, Gears, Google, GWT, Interview, Java, JavaScript
Reposted from my blog. I had the pleasure of finally meeting Didier Girard. I seem to run across Didier's work every week or so, but for some reason we haven't had a chance to meet face to face, until JavaPolis. Didier sat down with me to talk about GWT, Gears, Java, and JavaScript, and I Read the rest...
Monday, November 26th, 2007
Category: Gears, Offline, Showcase
Zoho Writer was quick to release offline support using Gears, which allows you to carry read-only views of your data around when you were offline. This was just the first step in their offline support, and now they have announced the next step. This new version allows you to edit on the road with a Read the rest...
Wednesday, November 21st, 2007
Category: Articles, Gears, Google, Offline, Showcase
Working on the Gears team we also run across applications that we would love to take offline. A lot of these applications aren't Google's so we thought it would be nice to be able to take third party apps offline. This also makes sense since Aaron Boodman (Mr. Greasemonkey) is co-tech lead on Gears itself! Read the rest...
3.4 rating from 264 votes
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
Category: Gears, Offline, Showcase
Mindmeister has taken their mind map tool and now allow you to map offline. The tool itself is a nice Ruby on Rails application (includes pink fade effects! yellow is so 2006) that gives you a visual canvas to play with your mind. Their approach to offline is similar to Google Reader in that the Read the rest...
Friday, October 26th, 2007
Category: Gears, JavaScript
Julien Lecomte has written up the pattern where you use setTimeout() to keep yielding control back to the main thread so that it can handle browser events. Completion Callback PLAIN TEXT JAVASCRIPT: function doSomething (callbackFn [, additional arguments]) { // Initialize a few things here... (function () { Read the rest...
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
Category: Gears, HTML
Dimitri Glazkov took a look at the HTML 5 SQL Storage API which WebKit just implemented and put together a Gears wrapper. As an example he has Stickies running on Firefox with Gears. The bridge is very simple indeed. Just take a peek at the code. The major note here is that the current draft Read the rest...
Friday, October 19th, 2007
Category: Examples, Gears, Google, JavaScript, Screencast, Showcase
I was excited when Google announced their first JavaScript API that allows you to write back to a service. Now, they have released a Blogger client that does the same, which means that you can now manipulate your blog posts directly from JavaScript. Along with the release there are a few examples such as: A Read the rest...
Category: Gears, Utility
Eric Abouaf has released Gears in Motion, a tool that allows you to quickly and easily look at your local SQLite database, and make edits on the fly. You can make schema changes, data chances, and see the entire flow of relationships. It even groks URLs so if you put a JPG in the database, Read the rest...
1.7 rating from 379 votes
Thursday, September 27th, 2007
Category: Gears, Google, JavaScript, Library, Offline
Brian Dunnington liked what he saw with the Dojo Offline Toolkit, and wanted to abstract it out so you could use functionality with any JavaScript library. He ended up with a new library called Vortex, a 10k JavaScript file that features: Ability to automatically detect referenced resources such as images, scripts, and stylesheets (including nested Read the rest...
Friday, September 14th, 2007
Category: Gears, JavaScript, Showcase
Brian Shaler noticed that almost a year ago, Digg removed the "search your own Diggs" feature, to the dismay of thousands of Digg users. To explain why the feature had not yet returned, they cited hardware and software solutions as being very complicated and expensive. Brian decided to re-implement the feature himself using the Digg Read the rest...
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
Category: Gears, Google, Offline
Eric Farrar of Sybase iAnywhere has been developing a prototype that allows direct database-to-database synchronization of a Gears application to Oracle, SQL Server, DB2 and Sybase databases. We asked Eric about his work and he told us: At Sybase iAnywhere we provide a data sync infrastructure for mobile and remote apps. The Background Sync architecture Read the rest...
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
Category: Articles, Gears, Google, Offline, Showcase
As I posted on the Google Gears Blog: Omar Kilani of Remember The Milk took the time to write up his teams experience in Taking web applications offline with Google Gears. The article moves past an introduction to delve into the design decisions around an offline-capable architecture, and user messaging and presentation of state. We Read the rest...
Friday, August 31st, 2007
Category: Articles, Gears, JavaScript
Jack Herrington and Steve Yen have put together a nice little article introducing TrimPath Junction: Junction is an all JavaScript framework that closely models the Ruby on Rails model-view-controller design pattern and implementation. And with the help of the Helma JavaScript web server, it runs the same code both on the client and on the Read the rest...
Thursday, August 30th, 2007
Category: Gears, Google
The Gears team has rev'd a new version aimed at developers. This release isn't going to propagate to end-user machines yet, as we want to time to hear from the community on the new features and APIs. Speaking of which... What's new? Cross Origin API Until now, there was no way to talk past the Read the rest...
