Google Docs Available Offline

I'm pretty excited about Google's recent announcement that Google Docs will soon be available offline. I actually really like their service, and I've found it handy on more than one occasion. Especially before iWork included Pages, it was really one of the best spreadsheet tools on the Mac. Even more exciting is the technology that allows you to hit up your favourite docs and spreadsheets while you're internet-disabled. The Google Gears API promises to be a great addition to the web developer's arsenal. Combined with other Google developer tools, this could be a nifty platform on which to build The Next Greatest Thing. I haven't done much playing with Gears myself, but I have done some work with Adobe AIR and Flex, which are indeed both very cool, and have a nice Eclipse-based IDE to boot. What's the best part about these tools? Simply that you can write a web-based application using familiar tools, and have it run offline on virtually any OS (Linux, Windows, MacOS, whatever), with Internet-enabled access-anywhere goodness. There's a drawback to this technology, though, and that's the potential for increased UI-tardedness on the part of developers. Apple and Microsoft, as well as the countless GNOME and KDE volunteers, have done thousands of hours of work to put together a consistent, easy-to-use, and appealing user interface widget toolkit. The OS-native UI kit integrates seamlessly with the computing experience; this is a feature that the up-and-coming offline toolkits like Gears and AIR can't possibly achieve immediately. I'm eager to be proven wrong, or at least to be shown how an amateur can design decent-looking applications with these tools that look like OS-native applications. At least with Java, despite all its client-side failings, anyone can build an application that looks like its native bretheren.