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."

Comments

Re:I know this may sound stupid . . .

[badasscat]

It's kind of interesting, when I first switched to 10.4 I used the dashboard aLL the time, and I used spotlight ALL the time.

now, however many months later, I don't use dashboard ever, and I use spotlight for 1) typing in application names to start them 2) in File Open dialogs occasionally.

I use a Mac at work. 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 use Karamba on my home Linux box, so it's not that I hate widgets; I just don't think the way they're implemented on Mac make them worth using. I'd rather have them persistent, but able to be turned off.)

Spotlight I use occasionally, but it gives me weird results. I'm sure I'm not using it right, but whenever I do I end up with a million results that have no relation to what I'm looking for. From what I remember, I also couldn't figure out how to search for, say, a set of files with a word in part of the name and a specific file extension.

If Google Desktop for mac is a little more intuitive and powerful, I'll probably end up using it over Spotlight.

Re:Umm

[Dan Berlin]

It's about 10x faster than spotlight at answering queries, maybe more.

Re:I know this may sound stupid . . .

[sootman]

Maybe it won't suck ass out loud like Spotlight does? Two cases:

- create a folder named FordChevyDodge. Search for 'Chevy'--it pops right up. Search for 'hevy'--nada. Oops. (That works just fine in 10.3.9, by the way.)

- create a file named 'file.txt' and put the text 'whateveryouwant' in it. Spotlight for 'whateveryouwant' and it pops right up. Change the file name to 'file.php' and Spotlight for 'whateveryouwant' again. No matches. Oops.

There's lots about Spotlight that I hate. I *loved* how search worked in 10.3.9 and still run 10.3.9 on every box that supports it for just that reason--I use Search a lot (though not 'search by content') and for me, 10.3.9 is just so much better in so many ways.

Re:Another anecdote

[Moridineas]

Speaking of which, a little know but IMHO awesome keyboard shortcut in OSX is to put your cursor over a word and press Cmd+Ctrl+D -- pops up a dictionary/thesaures lookup box for that word.. very nifty. (works in Cocoa apps)

Re:I guess you will never try Vista

[Gr8Apes]

I wonder how many people that complain about Vista have actually tried it. It's a vast improvement over XP, and represents five years of work. Many people have tried it. Some of us are forced to use MS software at work no matter what our own desires or even the inappropriateness of an MS OS.

> Add in the DRM'd OS, and there's no reason to run it at all.

This is a common misconception. DRM doesn't lock you out of your system. The addition of DRM to Vista *enables* you to play DRM'd media, which you would otherwise be unable to play on XP or Mac. Just keep repeating that as you wait 30 minutes to copy a 100MB directory tree on your system.

And I think you mean "legally play on XP or Mac" based on current DMCA law. We can only hope that the iTunes DRM issue in the EU will continue to roll over all DRM issues, because iTunes is actually the biggest argument against DRM I've seen.

More software works on Windows than on a Mac. I don't need 500 versions of gems or tetris. What I need is 1 of each of the following: photo editing , photo organization, video editing, CD/DVD burning, Mail. You get all of those with the OS right off the bat. I've since tried Aperture and Photoshop (CS3 beta). Aperture is replacing iPhoto. I have seen no need for anything more than iMovieHD, which IMHO outshines Pinnacle Titanium Studio by leaps and bounds.

Basically, I'm fed up of people saying how great SpotLight is when they haven't even tried any competing products. Just give Vista a try and tell us what you think. I intend to, right after SP1 comes out or they issue a patch to fix the file handling issues. That one makes it a non starter for me. I routinely work with hundreds of MB of files, and I find XPs hourglass annoying enough already when who knows what it's doing when I want to move a 6K+ directory tree from location A to location B on the same physical drive. (Hint - from the command line, such a move takes under a second) Basically, those are some of the items have me fed up with MS products.

To be honest, I give up. I can see you aren't willing to try it. That's your choice and I respect that. I can't see how suggesting alternative products from Microsoft is trolling but suggesting alternatives from Apple is not, but I can see I am in the minority here so I will go back to my cave now. Have a nice day. You're mistaken. I have no choice but to try it, eventually, unless a large scale change happens in the business world. You should also realize that I have run many other OSes as well, including Solaris, IRIX, OS/2, various flavors of DOS including a deskview instance, various flavors of Linux, etc. I by no means am a Mac fanboy. However, when it comes to comparisons of OSX and Vista, Vista is a johnny come lately to the party and is wearing mostly last years duds and brought flat cherry beer. It doesn't meet any of my needs well, and the one thing it claims to do, DRM, is completely irrelevant to me and is actually a negative considering how invasive the MS implementation is.

Re:Umm

[John Whitley]

Thunderbird, the only desktop client I can stand using ??? I use Thunderbird at work, primarily because it's been a choice between it and Outlook. But Thunderbird's mail editor is possibly the worst of any of the modern apps. It suffers from a flaw I thought was confined to the stupidity of MS Word: it is possible to delete invisible formatting marker, mangling the document's formatting. Backspace, backspace, OOPS, your document formatting is hosed. Even worse, sometimes this flaw causes the editor to expose underlying HTML/XML gunk in the editor.

You might think you could get around all this via editing in plaintext mode, eh? No dice. There is effectively no first-class plaintext mode in Thunderbird's mail editor. E.g. you can change to "plaintext" mode, but all it does is hide the formatting bar.. any fonts in the document remain, but now you can't change them, even to make them fixed width. Pasting into a "plaintext" editor preserves the original formatting -- including the big fonts and glaring colors from that web page you just copied from. So much for WYSIWYG -- there's no way to actually see what the mailer will send out with plain text formatting. You just have to smack it all to "fixed width" and hope for the best.

Aside from that, Thunderbird's mail filtering is fairly functional and does what I want. It seems to handle large email boxes allright, but its search is pretty slow.