Although both the new apps, Docs and Gears are still in beta versions, the move is directly aimed at Microsoft's proprietary industry-standard Office suite.
Google also has plans to extend the offline access to it and to other hosted services in the Google Apps suite, of which Docs is part. Apps also includes Gmail, Calendar, Talk and others.
Google said users of its Google Docs word processing application can use Google Gears to save and then edit documents without being connected to the Internet.
Google Gears is an open-source project that any developer can use to build offline capability into web applications. It installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system to locally cache the data. Google Gears-enabled pages use data from this local cache rather than from the online service. Using Google Gears, a web application may periodically synchronise the data in the local cache with the online service. If a network connection is not available, the synchronisation is deferred until a network connection is established.
