Weekly Google Code Roundup: Learning to Remember The Milk offline, flying over Earth, and searching your feeds

By Dion Almaer, Google Developer Programs

On the back of the stream of developer releases last week, we had some interesting activity in the community, and from our own product teams.

Omar Kilani, of the Remember The Milk team, did a fantastic, thorough write-up of his experience getting his product working offline with Gears. The article moves past an introduction to delve into the design decisions around an offline-capable architecture, and user messaging and presentation of state. We learn why Omar decided to go with the explicit offline mode, and then the five steps to offline conversion.

The Google Mashup Editor team has also been churning out new features based on your feedback. As a developer you can now enable public read only $user feed so that applications can share $user feeds to create social applications, edit XML, CSS and HTML files uploaded into the editor, work with Gadget files, and much more.

The cool easter egg of the week goes to the flight simulator that is in the most recent Google Earth application. There is something special about flying around the grand canyon, or over manhattan. Give it a try.

Flying is cool, but we all love searching. The Google Reader team released the much anticipated feature of being able to search across your feeds. If you knew that you had read about something a few days ago but couldn't find it, now you can.

Sharing is a kin to searching, and the Google Book Search, which had a significant Ajax facelift a year ago, has joined the two. A summer intern added the ability to save snippets from public domain books, and embed them to your website. It is as simple as selecting the text you want, and how you want to show it (an image of just text).

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Mark Stahl, tech lead of the Google data APIs, talked to us about GData, the history behind it, the parts and pieces, and how people are implementing applications on top of it.

Quicksilver is a keyboard-driven launcher that is the first application that I install when I get a new Mac. Nicholas Jitkoff, creator of Quicksilver, is a Google employee on the Mac team, and they finally got him to talk all about Quicksilver: past, present, and future.

Mark Utting came to talk about Model-Based Testing and he compares two different kinds of test model: black-box models and white-box models.

As always, check out the latest tech talks, subscribe to the Google Developer Podcast and visit the Google Code YouTube channel.