Google Calendar Gearing Up For Offline Features
Ever since the introduction of Google Gears, which provides the ability to add offline support to Google Services (and other sites that choose to implement it), users have been eagerly watching for signs of offline support in their favorite Google web apps. Google Reader was the first to get offline support, which came as part of the initial Google Gears launch.
Now it would seem that Google Calendar may be the next service in line for offline support. Sharp-eyed users over in the Google Blogoscope forums noticed that Google Calendar has been prompting some users to enable Google Gears on the Calendar page.
The natural conclusion is that offline support is coming soon. Tony Ruscoe, a Google Blogoscope reader points out in the thread that the Gears code is already in the Google Calendar page. If you type javascript:_olp_showPromo(); into the URL bar of your browser while you’re on the Calendar page, you’ll see the Google Gears dialog box pictured above.
Blogger Andy Pilgrim’s Google Calendar actually prompted him to enable Gears and he grabbed some screenshots. Pilgrim also contacted a Google representative who would only say that Google is “working on building offline capabilities into Google applications using Google Gears, but we have no specific details or launch dates to share yet.” Which is more or less exactly what Google told me yesterday when I asked about offline GMail support.
So far no one has found a way to actually enable the offline support and there’s been no official announcement from Google, but we think it’s a safe bet to say offline support is coming to Google Calendar sooner rather than later.
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