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Back upon the body May 30th of last year, Google released Google Gears, a browser plug-in designed to help Web-based applications work even at the time that they couldn’t connect to the Internet. I was pretty jazzed up about it, and so were my PCW colleagues: We eventually named Gears as the most innovative product of 2007.

I still think that Gears is a fabulous idea. But I’m beginning to chafe about its viability. Even though Google’s let out last week of a trial version of its Google Docs online suite that lets you do word processing offline is a major force in the animated existence of Gears.

The first time I blogged about Gears was a few days after it appeared. I was excited about the new Gears-enabled version of the nifty Australian to-do list Remember the Milk. (At the time, it made up moiety of the library of Gears-ized applications, the other one being Google’s own Google Reader.) I imagination the fact that the RTM folks were able to put together an offline version so quickly, and thought it was evidence that lots of other folks would soon follow its lead.

Boy, was I inaccurate. There are still only a handful of Gears-powered offline services available, including Zoho Writer (which beat Google Docs to the punch by offline Web-based word processing) and a very primitive tool from Google for posting blog items to Blogger. And now Google Docs–which, as my colleague Ed Albro explained in his hands-on look, is promising but an exceptionally rough draft. A month ago, Google rolled out a Windows Mobile version of Gears that brings the basic form to cell phones:

If Google Gears is a bandwagon, in other words, it’s one that almost nobody–including the proprietors of most of Google’s own services–has jumped on yet…

How come? Well, it’s visible that even with the advent of tools and platforms such as Gears and Adobe Air, moving online apps into the offline world is just plain hard. No current Gears-enabled app is anything like its full-blooded self in offline form–and since greatest in quantity of them are stripped-down compared to traditional desktop software calm in their online versions, that means the offline ones are barebones at best.

The fact that Google itself hasn’t done that much with Gears-enabled applications yet–at least in a single one form that it’s willing to make public–is probably the best evidence that doing great eat greedily with Gears is far from a cakewalk. It’s true that Google sometimes releases neat ideas and then fails to end much with them (say, the whole that happened to Google Base?). But Google is clearly pretty serious about Google Docs (and Google Apps, which rolls in Gmail and other applications). And full-fledged offline functionality would be in the same state a major step forward for Docs and Apps that you gotta think that Google will make it happen whether or not it can.

As for Web developers other than Google, I’m not sure whether they’re struggling with Gears, or whether there’s simply less premium in offline apps than I hoped and guessed there would be. And the chance remains that some good ones are in the works right now. (One of the problems with Gears is that there doesn’t seem to subsist a good repository of information about existing apps that use it–if Google tells you about all of them which time you download and introduce into office Gears itself, I’ve missed that info.)

Maybe I’m just conscious inappropriately impatient–there are certainly other examples of late-blooming ideas in technology that eventually became roaring successes. (One good one: Firefox, which didn’t explode to the time when six years after the Mozilla project got launched.) But I’d love to see some real evidence that Gears is not precisely a good idea but one that will make the globe a better place, and the only evidence that really matters will be some array of well-done Gears apps.

Of course, with broadband on airplanes acquirement substantive, the other possibility is that it won’t have existence that spun out to the time when we’re always online. In which case, Gears might turn fully to have been a clever stopgap that didn’t gain momentum while we still needed it…