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

[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.