Announcements

ASU Geared Up for Offline Use With Google Docs

I logged into my ASU Google Docs account yesterday morning to a great little surprise. It looks like ASU students now have access to the new offline features of Google Docs.

Google Docs is only the second web application from Google to take advantage of their Gears API (the first was Google Reader back in May). In a nutshell, Gears is “…an open source browser extension that lets developers create web applications that can run offline.” If you haven’t seen it already, here is the video announcement that Google published at the beginning of April.

There are a bunch of sites that take advantage of Gears already. There’s even a feed that features companies who have adopted Gears’ technology.

I just checked out a personal finance site called Buxfer that looks pretty cool. It has all the tools you would expect from a finance application - track spending, sync automatically with your existing accounts, add tags to purchases to see where the money’s going. They even have gadgets that you can drop on your Facebook, Netvibes, or myASU homepage. Take a tour of Buxfer’s features and sign up for a free account if you’re interested. I think I will…

Oh yeah - and remember Zoho? That online suite of insanely useful applications? Zoho has been using Google Gears since November 2007 with their Zoho Writer application. If you don’t have a Zoho account, what are you waiting for?

Have fun off line, kids.