Breaking the gap with Google Gears

The most of the applications which were limited to desktop are made available online now.Like google docs. , picasa for playing with images.So what does this mean,do we need to leave all the applications on desktop and starting using the online versions.Well both of them have their own pros and cons.

Desktop Applications

• More features to manipulate the data
• Easily accessable
• Secure ,only accessable to oneself.
  

Online versions

• Easy to share
• Can be viewed and modified from any machine.(Machine independent).
  
• No issues with backup and data loss.

The pros of desktop applications are cons to online versions and vice versa.So how do we break the barrier.Can we come with a solution were we can use both the versions together and come up with the unique solution.

Google Gears is a application where one can offload the data from a website to a local server and work on the data locally and finally the modified data can be uploaded and synched with the actual server data.Google is providing this feature with Google Reader , through which we can download the feeds locally ,read through them.Google claims this feature is very useful when we don't have a reliable internet connection.But I feel this feature can also be used to bridge the gap between the online and desktop version of applications.Lets see how it can be done.

Lets take the example of Excel.Consider online version of Excel is available too.Now using google gears using a single click we should be able to offload the content to a local desktop machine.Considering Excel is installed on local machine.We can play with the content , modify it and when finally done with it,with a single click we should be able to upload the data back to the server.With this we have all the advantages , we were able to locally use the full featured Excel to modify the content,use the online version to take care of sharing and backup issues.

This feature can also be extended to get the complete OS state.If I am using a desktop at my home and my operating system can give me its state information,then I can upload that data to a server.I can go to office and download the server state on office machine and start working from where I stopped at home.

That would be a ideal win considering the disadvantages of present desktop operating systems and the Web operating systems.