And now thanks to Gears I can read my news on the laptop even after it’s disconnected from the (inter)network!

This sort of functionality has been something that I’ve wanted for quite sometime, particular in the field of portable devices. The old adage of wanting to develop applications on PDAs and have them cache data offline whilst out on the field, then re-synchronise with the central database when they get back home.

Trust Google of course to make it all happen within your web-browser. Really good idea and I’m guessing it’s going to help them really start to rope people into the concept of the GoogleOS (which people have been talking about for a while now).

And to ice that cake of theirs they’ve provided a simple, documented API for all your code-monkeys out there.

Of course, the security side of Gears is fairly interesting, and I’m betting right now that forensic experts out there are dissecting the manifest files and all the other funky stuff that’s done in Javascript and Gears. Especially as in the API tutorial they show you that even after clearing firefoxes cache Gears still kicks in and stores that data offline.