[buug] Gears or no Gears?

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Zeke Krahlin (pewterbot9 at gmail.com):

> Would like some informed opinion....

An offering a guesstimate from a non-developer.  You'll have to decide
for yourself what that's worth in this context.

> Does anyone from BUUG know if Gears can violate my online priivacy in
> any way? How about tracking? 

You mean, in the sense of calling home to the Google, Inc. mother ship?
I really don't see how -- with the minor exception that the default
network location provider for the Geolocation API is maps.google.com, 
so you feed Google the usual slow trickle of "someone cares about this
place" data, same as whenever you use Google Maps.

Everything else in the Gears toolkit, as detailed on
http://code.google.com/apis/gears/ , seems to be strictly local
extensions inside and alongside the user's browser.

> Are the features offered mostly lazy
> workarounds, or will they really be an asset to my blogging? 

You'll really need to read Wordpress's docs about _how_ they use the
Gears interfaces, to judge that for yourself.`