I had the pleasure of taking a
trip back to my home land of England to meet up with the team behind the Google Gears for
Mobile product.
As someone who loves Web development, it is an exciting
proposition to be able to use the Web platform to be able to develop applications on the
mobile.
This release enables you to use the Gears 0.3 APIs on Windows
Mobile devices. With this new version, not only do you have access to the Database,
LocalServer, and WorkerPool APIs, but you can also create desktop shortcuts. Considering the
disconnected nature and latency issues inherent to the mobile networks, these APIs allow you
to deliver more responsive applications that can hide some of the problems.
Today, we saw the release of a
new mobile version of Picasa Web Albums that uses these features. I got to sit down
with Joe Walnes, tech lead of the mobile Picasa team. Joe and his team built both the
Gears-enabled version of Picasa for the phone as well as the iPhone version that allows you to
sit on the Tube and still flip through your family photos.
Joe tells us
about his experience building the Gears application.
I have also put together
an audio
podcast consisting of interviews with not only Joe, but other members of the Gears
team.
First, I talk to Charles Wiles, the Product Manager of the Google
Gears for Mobile team. He gives us a high level view of the project in general, and this
launch in particular. We also discuss the native abilities of Gears on the mobile, widget
platforms, and future Gears developments.
Second, we hear from two
engineers on the project, Dave Burke and Andrei Popescu. They go into detail on the platform,
how you architect mobile Web applications, how you develop and debug applications, new APIs
such as the Location API, and how Android fits in to the picture.
Finally, we hear again from Joe Walnes.
I am really excited about
the prospect of building rich mobile applications using Web based technology.
