Exclusive: Google Gears Now on Calendar

I just saw an interesting pop-up message while opening-up Google Calendar. It said the application wanted to use Google Gears, did I approve? Google Gears is Google’s offline reading application. I checked my settings, and I have already given Google Reader permission–and I didn’t even have Google Reader open–so this is definitely for Google Calendar.

Here’s a screenshot showing the message and the address for my Google Calendar…

I’m still investigating whether Calendar is now working with Google Gears, or if this was just a pre-emptive request, but it looks like we could be getting an offline version of Google Calendar–and maybe Gmail–very soon!

UPDATE: A Google spokesperson tells us: “”We’re working on building offline capabilities into Google applications using Google Gears, but we have no specific details or launch dates to share yet.” We’ll take that as a confirmation that a launch is imminent.