Gears Roadmap and Development Process
July 11th, 2007 | Published in Google Gears
It's been a little over a month since Gears launched. In these few weeks, we received great input from the community and been impressed by all the creative uses people have found for Gears. Now that Gears is public, we're moving into a completely open development model. The idea is to do all of our development and team collaboration in the open so that the community can keep updated on what we're doing and easily make contributions. There are a few updates that we'd like share so people know what's we're up to:
Gears Roadmap
Our objective is to efficiently take Gears to a state where it covers the requirements necessary for significant applications using the API on a large scale. This includes integrating the community's feedback on the API and smoothing the rough edges necessary for non-techie consumers to use Gears. To get an idea of what we're focusing on, you can check out the Gears Roadmap. Between now and mid-August we're aiming to deliver on a Cross-Origin API and an Improved Workerpool. Following that, by end of September, we'll be enabling full text search in languages other than English (specifically Japanese, Russian and Arabic). At the same time, we'll be localizing the UI (initial languages will be French, Italian, German, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Brazilian Portuguese).
Development Process
Our objective is for all Gears development to be conducted entirely in the open. This is still a work in progress, but we'd like to make it as easy as possible for developers to cut their own builds as well as submit contributions to the project. We made several relevant posts on the Gears Wiki over the last few days:
1) Build Instructions:
Building Gears for Windows
Building Gears for Safari
2) Contributing to Gears document outlines the basics of getting involved with Gears and can serve as an initial guide for contributors.