Announcing Gears (and Gearpad)!

This morning, I had the pleasure and terror of announcing Google Gears in Sydney, Australia.

As part of the design process for this project we experimented with taking several different types of applications offline. I thought it would be fun to try and take my old AJAX notepad, Halfnote, offline, and the result is Gearpad:

Launch Gearpad

It's basically just like Halfnote, but if you've got Gears installed, you can go offline and continue to edit your notes. When you come back online, everything will be synchronized.

Gearpad supports seamless movement between connected and disconnected operation without any specific "offline mode". This is accomplished by treating the Gears database module like a buffer, writing changes to it immediately and trying to push those changes to the server separately, when there is a connection. See the code in the Gears SDK for more detail.

It has been an incredible pleasure working on Gears. I really believe in the incremental approach to improving the web, and I have always wanted to work on browser APIs. On this project I was able to do both while working with some really great people.

Gears isn't done. Actually, it's hardly even started. We have some ideas for what's next, but what we really want is to hear what you think should be next. Join the mailing list and let us know. This is going to be fun :).