Since the super search giant rolled out Google Gears, we all knew the company will become a top player in the offline competition and today's piece of news seems to support this statement. It seems like Google Calendar is the next technology to get Google Gears support, the product which was designed by the Mountain View company in order to provide offline compatibility for the web-based solutions. According to Tony Ruscoe who posted a message on the Google Blogoscoped forum, you can easily get a sign that Google Calendar might go in offline mode by writing the following code in the address bar while being logged in into the Google Calendar account:

javascript:_olp_showPromo();

Being entitled 'Use Google Calendar Offline", the popup which appears after you enter the above code in the browser's address bar reads: "To view and edit the next 3 months of your Google Calendar when you're not connected to the Internet, click "OK". [A check sign] will appear in the top right of your screen whenever your data is ready to be viewed offline. Undefined. The feature uses the Google Gears browser plug-in (which is already installed on your computer)."

The interesting fact is that I get this message box even if I access Google Calendar with Safari for Mac OS X, so I guess the "Google Gears browser plug-in (which is already installed on your computer)" line is not proper for me.

Google Reader was the first technology which received offline support by means of Google Gears while several other products came soon after that. Earlier this week, the Mountain View company implemented Gears compatibility into Blogger and designed an offline blog editor which allows you to write posts in offline mode and publish them once an Internet connection is detected.