I was wondering if anyone has used google gears thus far, and what their impressions are of it from a technical level. It sounds similar to something Apple is using for their mobileme service to make their online services run like an offline program through javascript. I am not a programmer so I do not have the knowledge or ability to work with it and form my own opinions, but I have a couple ideas for programs I would like to eventually hire someone to write and I wondered how easy it was to write programs with that development environment and if the programs implemented would be significantly improved over options using ajax and php. I imagine it has the advantage of being able to work offline, but is it the future of online web application programming?