Gears (formerly called Google Gears) will be part of new Wordpress 2.6. It supports already today other services as Google Docs or Remember The Milk.

Google Reader is another application which benefits already today from Gears Offline caching of data into a database.

Gears is beta software offered by Google to enable offline access to services that normally only are available online. It installs a database engine, based on SQLite, on the client system to cache the data locally. Gears-enabled pages use data from this local cache rather than from the online service. Using Gears, a web application may periodically synchronize the data in the local cache with the online service. If a network connection is not available, the synchronization is deferred until a network connection is established. Thus Gears enables web applications to work even though access to the network service is not present.

Released under the BSD license, Gears is free and open source software.

The new WordPress release 2.6, announced for later august this year, will be able to use Gears. You can have a kind of sneak preview of version 2.6 by visiting the following page: wp.chrisjohnston.org. Chris provides an automatic renewed test side. The password for the user “admin” is “demo”.

mypictr.com provides a free picture resizing service, which allows you to create a custom profile avatar for your favorite social network. You don’t need to install any programs, plug-ins or any other software, just upload your picture, resize it online and download it from their server, where they claim it will be deleted within 10 minutes.

Imagine following situation, you are about to create a new profile at a new social network and the size of profile picture is limited to a custom width and height. You would probably search for a software which will allow you to adjust your picture to the right size. With mypictr you don’t need to search for the software, all you need to do is to upload your large picture, pick a right size (or custom size) and download a smaller profile picture.