Gears has been available for the Mac via the Firefox Web browser for some time, but Google just released a “beta” version of Gears for Safari. When connectivity is reestablished, Gears synchronizes the changes back up to Google’s storage cloud. Gears addresses the disconnected problem with a database engine based on SQLite, and Gears-enabled pages can send and receive data from this local database cache when offline. Google has been working on eliminating this limitation with a technology called Google Gears (Zoho Writer and a few other Web apps also use Gears – it’s an open source technology that any developer can implement). Like all online word processors, Google Docs has one significant architectural limitation: if you don’t have Internet access, your documents are completely unavailable to you.
Its brilliant collaborative capabilities more than make up for its minimal feature set, and I have found it better for my needs than similar products like Zoho Writer and Buzzword, which don’t seem as focused on enabling quick collaboration.
Although it’s a mediocre word processor, we’ve started using Google Docs for certain sorts of collaborative writing, such as when Tonya and I are working on marketing materials for Take Control, or when I’m writing an article for Macworld. It’s ironic that with all the writing I do, I’ve never settled on a single word processor, instead picking and choosing among lots of different ones depending on the task at hand.
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