I spent the morning trying out Google Gears with Google Reader at the airport before my flight out to Denver for SLA. For anyone who missed the many announcements this week, this is Google's first big public move into making their applications work offline.
There's a plugin to install, and then you're ready to go. You can then download your feeds to scan offline, read the feed headlines and summaries, and star what you'll want to read when you're back online (making sure that you've left your Google Reader page up when you go offline) and then resynchronize your feeds to go back to online mode.
- It was a bit slower in offline mode, but not enough to be a problem
- The 'Mark All As Read' button is disabled, so you have to J-click through the feed headlines
- Images did not get pulled into the feeds in offline mode, whether they were web comics or structures from ACS journal abstracts.
