Google goes full throttle on its Gears

Still in the news around Google I/O developer conference on last Wednesday, one of many Google's services that took center stage and caugth everyone attention is Google Gears. Even though Google Gears is only one years old, many software developers from web sites to mobile platforms have heralded it as the service of the future.

How is that? Well, in short Google Gears for desktop has the capabilities to give notifications on the desktop of various events, support for location information, better interactions with a computer's file system, and technology to let large file uploads proceed even when hampered by intermittent network connectivity.

Basically Google Gears is just another advancement of today's web browsers abilities, the same thing of Yahoo's newest service: BrowserPlus. Chris Prince, a lead Gears engineer, said in an interview at the Google I/O conference: "I think people have realized the browser is kind of broken. A lot of us are trying to improve it." He demonstrated five Gears prototypes to Stephen Shankland (Webware):

• One let a Web page create a shortcut icon on a computer's desktop so people could launch that Web application with a double-click instead of a more laborious process.
  A notification process, which like Yahoo's BrowserPlus feature ties into a computer's general system notification abilities, is a major missing piece in letting Web applications seize a user's attention the way desktop apps can. "Web apps have this problem where they can't tell users about important things happening on their system," Prince said.
• His file system demonstration showed a dialog box that let him select a large group of photos for upload rather than the one-file-at-a-time process that today afflicts Web site operations.
• A "blob"-processing ability could be used, for example, to divide a large file into bite-sized pieces, an approach that makes it easier to restore an upload interrupted by a bad network connection.
• He used a geolocation-processing ability to process latitude-longitude information to provide a more useful Google map showing bars near Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Google doesn't stop there to spread its wings to dominate the whole web services alone, because Charles Wiles and Andrei Popescu, who work on the Google Gears for mobile project in London, discussed the current state of Gears for mobile right after Prince explained about Google Gears for desktop version. Where Its real power is for mobile users, laptop road warriors and, in the case of mobile phones, for people who are in and out of range of cellular data networks.

Josh Lowensohn (Webware) has got a very good explanation why Google Gears for mobile platforms is important: The main takeaway from the talk is that Gears for mobile phones can solve some of the problems frequently found on mobile Web apps--mainly slow connections and people dropping out of the range of a data connection during data transfer. The example shown was Google Photos, which has a mobile version that's recently become Gears enabled. Users who have a Gears mobile enabled device can download thumbnails and indexes locally, to avoid having to download them the next time they visit. This means Gears enabled pages will load faster as long as they're in your Gears mobile cache.

These whole Google Gears features are still quite vague at the moment, but we do know that it supports Windows Mobile 5 & 6. The upcoming Opera Mini and Opera 9,5 will also be Gears enabled, and yes you may count in Android will definetely has it too. No other talks are mentioned about support for BlackBerry or iPhone, and no more news about other mobile OS either. Hopefully Palm Nova will support it too, since we're seeing more and more use of Google's services everyday now.

[blogged with my Treo 750v]