While I’m sad to hear offline usage is going nowhere, I’m definitely someone who’d benefit from having a local cache of tags in particular.

Independence of Flash is also always nice, mainly because Gears support for Linux and Windows Mobile is ligthyears ahead of Flash, and as I use both platforms a lot and have a tendency to upload way too many photos to my posts, a non-flash multi-file upload would definitely be something I’d like to see implemented in WordPress.

Thanks again for your great insight. I feel very well informed

It would be a huge job and we’re not sure that we can currently offer something significantly better than the excellent offline blog editors like Scribefire, Livewriter, etc.

Definitely a good item to revisit again.

A couple things Andrew shared that are in the pipe:
* Gears support of Safari is almost there.
* There is some testing of caching the blog’s categories and tags in a local database to further speed up loading of the edit/write page. That would produce a noticeable speed increase only on blogs that have lots of them.

Andrew and team are closely following the development of Gears and as it evolves and implements new features, we will be bringing the most beneficial of them to WordPress. A new feature that looks very interesting is the ability to upload multiple files through Gears. That might be a good replacement for the Flash uploader.

I, like many others I guess, have noticed the dramatic speed increase provided by gears, especially when on a lower-quality network-link, and can’t wait to be able to easily keep working on my blogs even if temporarily disconnected.