Google Gears - the good the bad and the ugly
June 8, 2007 — Tim NashI know its been done to death but I thought I would bring you my take on the big thing from Google this month Google Gears for those who have been living on mars (hows the weather?) Google Gears is a small application designed to help you use Google services offline the first service to get the gears treatment is Google Reader (an RSS reader in case you missed that while on mars to!)
The Good
It works! no it really does work I’m sitting in the middle of a forest on a grey day writing this blog post (The Boss is making us do away days!) while looking through the various feeds I have in my feed reader on my windows partition, interestingly their is some differences between Mac (who install gears via a firefox extension) and windows versions with the windows version being significantly bigger. While in Offline mode Google reader performs well but you do notice the lack of search facilities more, it seems a sham that with such a powerful data set at your finger tips their is no obvious way to mine the data.
The Bad
To get things working is a little on the tricky side but the following eventually worked for me:
- Download Gears
- Close firefox and all other browsers (including word or anything IE related)
- Run the exe
- Restart the machine (probably me being paranoid) and run your browser go back to Google Reader and reclick offline
Hopefully its working, it took me several attempts and the guys at Lifehacker were reporting similar issues. Multiuser support is non existant and while not really a problem offline the lack of any form of security may be an issue when it rolls out to GMail (which I’m sure it will). Images are not downloaded nor is there any method to select which messages to be downloaded this might not seem an issue but you are capped on the number of messages being store (it appears to be around 2000)
The ugly
Not really the ugly but a niggle in the back of my mind, gears is a fantastic little application but by installing it you are agreeing to Google terms and conditions, I’m wondering how long it will be before we find adsense ads being stored and displayed offline? My big concern is privacy both the protection of my data, I would like to see forced authentication (even if you have ticked store my password) and a clear idea of what Google will do with the data being sent back to them from the app.
Where next
Well GMail and Google Docs are the obvious next areas for Gears, both are crying out for offline access, then perhaps I will be able to ditch post2blog in favour of Google apps on a more permanent basis. Google has opened up Gears allowing 3rd party developers to use its features one such application is the remember the milk to do list software but I’m sure many more will follow, I just wonder how this will effect the offline access that was being discussed for Firefox 3?
John Matts - While Tim recovers from his weekend
Note from Tim: I go away for a weekend clear instructions for people to write on the blog what do they do, forget to publish them… I kid not
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June 8, 2007 at 4:11 pm
This development marks Google more than ever as a competitor to Microsoft in the office productivity software suite. Even if they deny they are trying to compete. Even if the Microsoft counterparts have several decades of development in advance and enjoy the privilege of having hundreds (if not thousands) of features that the current Google apps don’t have. Even if most traditional business will stick to their Intel/Windows/Office solutions. This is continuing to make Google a serious competitor.
First of all, and this is widely known, 80% of the users use 20% of the features of any given application. While that 20% may vary from user to user, it is generally the same for most of them. Even if Google apps cannot do everything Microsoft office can it doesn’t matter. I for one car survive perfectly with it. Also keep in mind these products are still in their early development phases. Soon they will have more features added to them.
I can install Linux and/or Mac in my company, and forget about the compatibility issues that may arise. This no longer becomes a problem. Google apps support both open and microsoft formats.
I no longer have to worry about data backups, redundancy, synchronization, sharing, etc. Of course this also has the flip side of having the paranoid users freak out over Google seeing your data. For those of you in that group reading, let me just say: You have no privacy! Deal with it.
This market needs more heterogeneity. It’s been crying for it for years now. Other companies have tried to deliver it, but simply have failed. I think Google’s solution may just be what we have been waiting for.
June 8, 2007 at 5:41 pm
How to reply so you like Gears?
July 23, 2007 at 2:19 pm
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