Sites with a lot of static information — Wikipedia, any API documentation, web-based email — would be great to be able to use when no internet connection is available. But what if you’re a user that always has an internet connection? Then adding Gears to a site doesn’t do much, right? Wrong. Imagine your favorite website is now stored on your computer, and it syncs whenever there’s altered content. Whenever you look at the site, your browser is grabbing everything straight from your hard drive. Did you just make a search for your best friend on Facebook? Don’t wait 5 seconds the next time that search runs, have the results immediately! Meanwhile, save the webmasters’ precious bandwidth/server power!

Here’s the Greasemonkey script for Wikipedia (requires Firefox + Greasemonkey + Gears). For each Wikipedia article you want to save, click on “cache page” and the script will save the text and the images. It would be nice to make it work with any site.

Read More About the project on Google Code
Via Ajaxian

Well Microsoft has finally come up with a product that potentially looks like a competitor to Google Gears that was launched earlier this year. Dubbed as Microsoft Sync Framework it will help developers take their web services and Databases offline to work in an environment without being connected to the internet. The Framework will offer P2P synchronization of any file type, including contacts, music, videos, images and settings, and provides built-in support for synchronizing relational databases, NTFS/FAT file systems an RSS feeds.

According to Microsoft,

“The advantage of a synchronization-based solution is that users are no longer required to have a constant network connection to access their information. Since their data is stored locally they are given constant access to their data while offloading processing requirements from the central database. Furthermore, the user is no longer limited by the network speed and can now access the data at the speed of the device. “

Well Microsoft has had a late entry into this field, because Google Gears is picking up steam pretty fast and a lot of popular web services are taking their applications offline. Well Microsoft has a pretty hard task ahead, lets see how they tackle it.

If you are a developer looking to develop apps for Offline Access then you might want to download Microsoft Sync Framework.

Via ZDNet

Zoho’s decision to go offline would mean a lot more people finally moving onto web office. Because reading and editing documents offline is the single best asset which Office Software on the desktop have. Also Interesting to note is that Zoho is gone online using google gears much before Google could use it for Google Docs and Spreadsheets.

Here is a small demo video of the capabilities of Zoho Writer Offline

What do you think about this feature of Zoho, will this feature give tough competition to the other services ?