Gears doesn’t just do offline
Dion Almaer (of Ajaxian fame, of course) is writing a cool series about Google Gears. Apparently the nice people at Google have further-reaching ambitions than “just” an offline browsing api.
Reading through the Gears wiki you’ll sense that there’s no distinct direction for the developments of the tool, but there’s plenty of stuff to look forward to: The Location API, the Image Manipulation API (although it seems to be quite limited since you can’t manipulate images on the bit level and thus program your own manipulations), and the Messaging API.
Update: This new post in the series underlines the potential problem in the Image Manipulation API. You can only do the stuff with images that Google allows you to. No access to the actually content of the Blobs − only the meta data.