Google Gears helps me maintain my sanity.
Jun 11th, 2008 by Mark Spahr
As I previously mentioned here, my school is in session all summer long. One of the pains joys of working in a correctional facility is being required to take refresher safety trainings each year. This first week of the summer session is our week for this training. So far we have covered ‘Transports for non-security personnel’, ‘Critical incidents’, and ‘CCG’ (a sort of crisis intervention training). All of it is pretty dry stuff. Factor in that these “classes” are being taught by security officers (who are doing their best) to a bunch of teachers (who don’t do well sitting at desks while being lectured- wonder why we would ever expect this of our own students, but I digress), and you have a recipe for a major snoozefest.
To make matters worse, the trainings are held in a room with no internet access. Now 99% of the information being presented this week I have heard at least 6 or 7 times. I need something to keep my mind occupied. Here is where Google Gears has been a life saver.
Google Gears allows you to access content while offline. Today I have used it with my Google Reader. It is a simple add-on for Firefox. It adds a small button that allows you to switch between online and off line modes. Hit the button to switch to off line mode and Google Gears downloads the first 2000 items from your
reader. With my high speed connection at school, this took less than a minute. I was able to read most of the things that I normally would if I were online. I say most things because it does not pre-load the pages that are outside of Google Reader. This can be an issue if the site you are subscribed to only allows a headline or short summary in it’s feed.
Overall, I am pleased with Google Gears. It is great to be able to keep my mind busy by reading the stuff in my aggregator while I am without internet access. One thing it does not do is allow you to choose to download the pictures that are part of the posts. I know that this would slow the download considerably and increase the memory load, so I understand why it does not do it. Perhaps it is something they will add as an option in the future.
