Beating Google to the punch, Zoho today announced that they’ve used Google’s Gears technology to enable full offline editing with their Writer application. Google’s “Docs” word processor (based on Writely) s still online only. Like other applications employing Gears (Google’s most excellent Reader has been “Gear-ed” for a long time now), you simply click on an Offline link and the current content you have open in the application is saved to a SQLite database on your Mac, Windows, or Linux PC.
It works quite well. Zoho has posted a video demonstrating the capability and an official announcement on their product blog. The limitations of working in the browser chrome notwithstanding, this is a critical step towards making web apps truly competitive with rich client applications and if a browser-based word processor meets your needs, Zoho has taken the lead in delivering critical functionality for those times when you cannot be connected to the net.
