Posted by Brad Neuberg, Google Developer Programs
We are constantly asked what are best practices when working with Gears. For example, what’s the best way to work with the local database for performance and reliability? What are good architectures for syncing and offline applications? We’ve just updated the Gears Developer FAQ with a whole slew of Best Practices, many with sample code that you can use in your own Gears-based applications. Here’s a sampling of the new additions.
Best Practices for:

Starting With Gears
Offline Architectures
Online/Offline Detection
Gears Permissioning
Installation and Detection
Using LocalServer With Web Applications …

Posted by Brad Neuberg, Gears Team
I’ve posted an in-depth article and tutorial on creating a client-side search engine with Gears. Here’s a short snippet from the article:
Did you know that you can use Gears to do fast, client-side searching of data, similar to a client-side search engine? Gears bundles Full-Text Search (FTS) abilities right into its local, SQLite database. MySpace, for example, uses this feature with their MySpace Mail application, downloading all of a user’s messages for fast, client-side search. Because all of the data is local, you can do …

Posted by Brad Neuberg, Gears Team
WordPress.com just recently went live with Gears support for accelerating the user-interface, and the upcoming WordPress 2.6 release will also bundle Gears.
Andrew Ozz, a member of the WordPress team and the person responsible for the Gears integration wrote the following guest post on his experience working with Gears:
I thoroughly enjoyed working with Gears. After checking the excellent API documentation and examples, the test implementation of a ManagedResourceStore in WordPress was ready to go in about an hour.
After that I only had to refine the various …

Posted by Dion Almaer, Gears Team
When a lot of developers think about Flex, they often tie it to Flash and AIR, but you can of course integrate Flex applications with many other front-end services.
Mrinal Wadhwa has seen value in building Flex applications, and also likes functionality available in Gears.
He wrote up an article on enhancing Flex applications with Gears which had him create a sample application the uses the Desktop API in Gears.
It is interesting to take a look at the source to see how Flex applications tie back to …

Posted by Dion Almaer, Gears Team
We had a great time at Google I/O at the end of May, and there were plenty of Gears-related content. Fortunately, video cameras were at the ready, and all of the sessions have been published on YouTube.
I put together a playlist (embedded player above) of the Gears content which includes:

Improving Browsers in New Ways: Gears++
Google Gears for Mobile
HTML 5, Brought to You by Gears
Gears and MySpace – Search on the Client
Taking Large-Scale Applications Offline
Gears Case Studies

Also, you may be interested in other Ajax related content …

We will be performing system maintenance March 20th; the interface will be unavailable at this time. Tracking will not be interrupted and reporting data will be restored shortly after the interface comes back online.

We anticipate the interface will be unavailable from 9 a.m. through 6 p.m. EDT (GMT 1 p.m. -10 p.m.).

Reposted from the Google Retail Blog

Last but not least, our final learning for the rest of 2010: the evolution of multi-channel behavior.
With searches for “buy online, pick up in store” up by as much as 100% this past December, multi-channel shopping has evolved as the new face of commerce, the norm rather than the exception. In fact, when asked, 34% of consumers researched online before buying offline and 21% researched online and offline, before purchasing online.

As we see, consumers leverage both the online and offline worlds in making their final …

Recently we asked some members of our publisher community for feedback on a number of network features.  Based on the responses we received, we felt that folks could benefit from more live help.
Our publisher support team has since launched live office hours.  These live chats will be hosted through WebEx and the first session will take place on the Friday, March 26th, at 12:00pm CST.  A publisher support representative will take questions from the group on a first-come, first-served basis.  Responses will be provided live to the group.
We …