Sandy, thanks you for your kind words and for info about Yahoo! Toolbar, didn't know that. Here in Russia nobody uses Yahoo services. But Opera's share is about 25% here and Opera doesn't support Gears so we have similar problems.
As for building something public in Gears, I strongly beleive in progressive enhancement approach. Gears-based solutions should be enhancement that make user experience better if Gears is supported. Detecting if browser is able to do Gears is simple and reliable thanks to Google guys. If Gears plugin is missed a message with install instructions may be displayed. Users without Gears don't loose anything - they have the same functionality as before, and users with Gears are awarded with improved usability, so it's better to have such Gears solution than not to have. GearsUploader is intended to be implemented in the way it will not require server-side changes in most cases. So non-Gears, traditional, accessible version of upload form should be developed first. And then one of GearsUploader's classes should be used to make this form better for users with Gears. It is supposed to be nice pure client-side optional enhancement rather than the only way to upload files. On 13 окт, 12:50, Sanford Whiteman <[email protected]> wrote: > > Gears plugin is much less widespread but I found installation user- > > friendly and customizeble. Gears plugin is used, for example, by > > Gmail and Google Reader for offile data storage, by Youtube for > > their video uploader and by Myspace for faster message filtering. > > I'm impressed with your project. Just a note that anyone who has the > Yahoo! Toolbar for IE (a _ton_ of regular users) can't use Gears. We > debated building something public on Gears, but this was a > deal-killer. (Especially because of the link between JRE setup and Y! > Toolbar -- if you've used applets in the past, you've implicitly > pushed the toolbar to some portion of your users, and now they can't > switch to a Gears-based alternative.) > > -- Sandy
