Google Gears, iPhone, and Safari
These three things may really change the face of web applications. Google gears lets you store information locally so you can use your web application offline. Right now the only program I know that uses Gears is Google Reader. There is a standalone program for Windows and a Firefox program for OS X that will let you use the Gears capability. With Google Reader it lets you download your feeds and read them offline. The capabilities are very limited. You can’t change the category of a feed. It will only let you mark them as read and then sync. Even with just this basic functionality it is a huge step forward in web applications.
This week it was announced that there would be no SDK for the iPhone. Apple expects developers to just write web applications for anything on the iPhone. Obviously this is pretty limiting–especially when the iPhone has been touted as running an actual version of OS X. To help give people a way to test their applications, Apple released a beta version of Safari for Windows.
In Google’s discussion about Gears, they said that they are making a version for Safari. If this happens and if it is something that Apple will incorporate into the iPhone, it could give developers the capability to create applications on the iPhone that go well beyond current web applications.