On Monday google announced a beta of Gears for Safari. Gears allows the content of supporting webapps to be stored locally thus available when you are offline.

After installing Gears for Safari and tinkering a bit I was happy to find it working without many problems. Later I was pleasantly surprised to find that Gears was also showing up and working in Fluid!

I fired up my Google Reader SSB and speedily downloaded 2000ish articles with the click of a button. When I disconnected from the internet and relaunched my SSB all my articles (minus images) were waiting for me. After reading through a few I reconnected to the internet and sync up my read/unread count. Easy as pie.

I thought this was pretty nifty so I tried it out with google docs. Upon “trusting” google docs it allowed me to put an icon on my desktop to act as a shortcut. I was surprised to find that when clicking the icon it actually launched my specific google docs SSB. Unfortunately when trying to go offline google docs gave me this error:

An error occurred while updating software. Failed to update software for the applications: Google Spreadsheets

No dice with offline google docs for now.

I have to say I am pretty impressed with how well the Gears BETA is working in Fluid. When a full version of Gears is released for Safari/Webkit I can only begin to imagine the many ways It can be used. If you want to give it a shot for yourself you can download it here.

Anyone else have any interesting Fluid + Gears experiences? What webapp would you be most excited to gain Gears support?