I posted to the gears group earlier today about the glitches in the Google Reader install experience and got a nice response from Aaron Boodman who suggested I check out remember the milk which has a nice offline experience implemented with Gears.
So, I uninstalled Gears and gave it a whirl. In so doing, I realized I had not done an apples-to-apples comparison since what I captured for Google Reader was the upgrade experience not the initial download experience, so I’ve updated my previous post with the info below.
Remember the Milk has really done a nice job with this. The installation took just a few minutes. After setting it up initially, I could go back and forth between online and offline without really thinking about it.
The only momentary glitch was with the stupid IE Popup blocker which reloads the page. I wonder if there is anyway around that? I wrote about running into this issue on the gowebtop blog but I wonder in this case if there would be a way to create an in-page install to avoid this hiccup.
Google Reader Upgrade Experience
I’m including the Goggle Reader update experience here for reference.
Upgrading to Gears 0.2 and getting started with Google Reader had just a few steps. I ran into a two glitches that you can see in slide 3 (when the icon wasn’t there even though the help tip told me it was) and slide 9 when I needed to refresh the page. It was hard to tell whether these are issues with the Google Reader implementation or with Gears (but Aaron from the Gears team believes it was an issue with Reader and they are working to sort that out). In any case, the whole experience was just a couple of minutes including setting up the reader with an opml file I had to go export from bloglines.
My experience with GReader using Gears was that it took a log time to sync for offline use and then i lost all that data when I went online again so I had to do it all over. That was really annoying so I just gave up hope on gears right there.