I use Google Reader along with the Firefox notifier plugin extensively. It’s one of the best RSS aggregators I’ve ever used, not because it is the slickest in terms of the UI, but because it does its job pretty well and fits in nicely with how I browse the web (unobtrusive, integrates well with Firefox and so on).
I clicked on the Firefox notifier for it today and when the page opened I was presented with the soon to be familiar request to use Google Gears for offline storage.
So far it’s pretty obvious, but I think there’s going to be some new challenges making sure you let users know how they might use offline storage, and why. Google Reader did a good job of this by pointing me at a little green arrow and letting me know I can store my news articles for offline viewing by clicking it.
Upon clicking this you can see it begins downloading the information and storing it in the SQLite database. The process isn’t as quick as it could be, no doubt because it is using XML, but it’s not too slow on a decent connection.
To try to throw it off I disconnected half-way and was presented with another message.
I’m not sure how much of this is built in, but I presume this would be another area in which web developers will need to consider user messaging for these extra scenarios; not a problem for most RIA guys who are well used to the asynchroncity afforded by Flash and AJAX (and soon doubly-so through the rise of parallel computing ;)).
All in all, a good experience and it definitely adds value to news aggregation, I’d say mostly beneficial to those who travel a lot. Looking forward to seeing this implemented in Google Maps if at all possible (binhex those images?), the number of times I’d like to cache a few portions of map before beginning my journey is rising.