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Announced this week, Gears is a technology that provides access to online services when a computer is offline. It comprises a a local server, to cache and serve Web application resources - HTML, JavaScript, images and the like - and a database, to store and access data from within a Web browser. But not Safari.

The reason is that Gears employs the latest WebKit technlogy which has yet to be included in shippipng versions of OS X. However it is available as a standalone application that happily works alongside the standard Safari installation. So, if you want to play, as

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Google puts it, with Gears on a Mac you need to to download a WebKit build from nightly.webkit.org as well as the Gears beta from gears.google.com.

Google Gears for WebKit comprises the Gears.plugin installed into /Library/Internet Plug-Ins and an InputManager - GoogleGearsEnabler - installed into /Library/InputManagers. The GoogleGearsEnabler ensures that Google Gears can provide resources to Web applications. It registers a NSURLProtocol class only if the OS X Application is a supported version of Safari or WebKit. Once installed, the registered class will check any URL requests to see if Google Gears can provide the content. If so, it will intercept the call and provide the data. Otherwise, the URL will be processed normally. This is how Google Gears is able to work when your Mac is not connected to the Internet.

Installing Google Gears is just the first step and only intended for developers of Web applications who will need to tweak their code before the software is ready to be used offline.