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Google Desktop for Mac Released
Julio Ojeda-Zapata writes "Google on Tuesday will release a Mac version of Google Desktop. This software, like the PC version, indexes the content of a hard drive and serves it up on familiar Google-style search-result Web pages (or via a its own drop-down results list, if you prefer). But Google Desktop for the Mac is streamlined compared to the busy, gadget-y Windows version, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. The focus is squarely on search — including local indexing of an online Gmail account of your choice. It will also index your iDisk."
I can't be the only person still running 10.3.9 (on 2 boxes). Spotlight just wasn't that killer of an app to me.
That said, 10.5 looks intriguing, so if the Spotlight-like feature is the only feature of Google Desktop I would need, it would serve my needs for 2 months, at most.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Does this somehow outperform spotlight without adding vulnerabilities?
Gmail?
Did you even bother reading the summary before posting?
I was asking myself the same question every one else is ("why use this instead of spotlight?") and while I'm not 100% convinced to move over to it, The Unofficial Apple Weblog has a good case for using it; if you're using Google homepage and Google Mail, it integrates with those (showing search results on the homepage and being able to download and search your Gmail).
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
"I can't be the only person still running 10.3.9 (on 2 boxes). Spotlight just wasn't that killer of an app to me."
The download page says you need 10.4+ to run Google Desktop so you're still SOL.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Exactly. Spotlight is a desktop search. Google Desktop will index your entire browser history, will index your Gmail account locally, and your Google search history. So, that means you can search across both Web content and desktop content simultaneously.
My blog
Quicksilver may not be a "search tool" per se... but it searches just fine. Beats spotlight hands down, and has nifty features like triggers. I'm not sure I will need more google in my life...
Chaos is Divine *
That's not as big a problem as you'd think.
1. Other apps haven't had a problem because of this. Both Mozilla and OpenOffice, for example, insisted on writing their very own framework and widgets, so basically they're _neither_ Gnome nor KDE. Your line of thinking seems to be that that would make them shunned by both KDE and Gnome users, yet that's not really the case. And then there's stuff like XMMS, which doesn't even try to look even remotely like the desktop, and had no problem either.
2. In the meantime both KDE and Gnome can use each other's themes. So you can just write your app with either set of widgets and it won't look out of place on the other desktop.
3. I'd buy your argument if it were some really complex app, with lots of forms and controls. Essentially all you really need there is a freakin' web-page-like page, in a frame. As long as you can draw a white background with a rectangle for the input and a button, you're actually good to go for a simple search app. (The borders and title bar of the frame will be drawn by the window manager anyway, so you don't have to worry about those.)
4. And you don't even have to do that, if your goal is to look like Google. I.e., like a web page. Think about it. You can just serve HTTP on the port of your choice, restrict it to localhost so it's not abusable from outside, your "application" icon just starts a browser on that port. There you go: now the user can use whatever browser they prefer, and have it look like any other page in that browser. They can use Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror if they absolutely have to have a KDE-only environment, or whatever.
Basically, let's lay _that_ tired argument to rest at least in this case. Linux has some problems with mass adoption, yes, but constantly claiming that you can't write apps because there are 2 desktops... is just false, and it's getting repetitive and boring by now.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'm watching it run right now, and Google didn't reinvent the wheel, exactly. Google Desktop is running mdimport (the program that invokes the Spotlight plugins to convert files to collections of terms) in the background. What Google is providing is a replacement/supplement for the Spotlight search interface, but not all of the Spotlight software stack. This is how Google Desktop takes advantage of all your existing Spotlight Importer plugins. (Which are damn easy to write. Props to Apple for that.)
Spotlight's indexing could use some improvement, so I'm looking forward to seeing how Google Desktop performs on my large collection of PDF and Postscript files. Spotlight doesn't seem to do very intelligent ranking of the documents it returns, so unless the search terms are fairly unique, the results can be impossible to sift through. Hopefully Google (or maybe 10.5) will improve that.
The first time I tried the dashboard I could not believe anyone thought this was either useful *or* cool; I haven't touched it since.
I'm an academic writer and I find the F12 call to bring up the calendar and the dictionary + thesaurus a godsend. As with anything, YMMV.
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I can't think of a single product, excluding things like toilet paper, that are meant for every single possible purchaser or user on the planet.
You haven't travelled much have you? Many cultures do not use toilet paper.
You know, the old "Find" command from ye olde Mac days isn't gone, it's a Command-F away, just like always. Spotlight is just in addition to that. If Spotlight doesn't work the way you want, just don't use it.