14 DAY TRIAL // It can be really frustrating to be working on some school related project or on a research and need all the information available and suddenly your Internet Service Provider to fail to deliver on its end. It happened to me a lot because, back in the days I was in school and needed such information, well, let's just say that the Internet didn't have such a wide reach as it has today.
Pissed me off, it did. But I had to put up with that sudden loss in "inspiration" and start making stuff up as I went on about whatever it was. Ad-libbing it all the way. It's just that my sources suddenly came to be "undisclosed" and not so certain. Well you lucky dawgs really got it good today: you can simply cache the entire Wikipedia and then continue your work offline. All you need to do is, as I said, cache every single page (insert big sadistic grin here).
Ionut Alex Chitu reports on his blog that "Ajaxian talks about an interesting way to use Google Gears for sites that don't necessarily integrate with Google's toolkit for offline applications: inject code using Greasemonkey." Here's the pitch line for the project, provided by Ajaxian:
"Sites with a lot of static information -- Wikipedia, any API documentation, web-based email -- would be great to be able to use when no internet connection is available. But what if you're a user that always has an internet connection? Then adding Gears to a site doesn't do much, right? Wrong. Imagine your favorite website is now stored on your computer, and it syncs whenever there's altered content. Whenever you look at the site, your browser is grabbing everything straight from your hard drive. Did you just make a search for your best friend on Facebook? Don't wait 5 seconds the next time that search runs, have the results immediately! Meanwhile, save the webmasters' precious bandwidth/server power!"
I'm guessing you couldn't care less about that bandwidth/server power, but it is possible so why not mention it? And after all, this really is a big help for those using a dialup connection.