Slashdot Log In
Google Desktop for Mac Released
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Apr 04, 2007 07:31 AM
from the very-frooty dept.
from the very-frooty dept.
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."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
Umm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Umm (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:Umm (Score:5, Insightful)
If you need to ask that question, don't bother downloading it, while people who DO want to do that will download it. Sound good? I doubt Google released this to please you specifically.
Oh, and it's nice to have your Gmail locally searchable while offline without having to use the piece of crap that is called Mail.app (spotlight cannot index Thunderbird, the only desktop client I can stand using).
What good does an open browser window do you if you're on a plane or bus with no internet connection? You see, there are these wonderful things called laptops. Wireless internet coverage is absolute crap up here in Canada.
Sorry, but it really bothers me when people say "Why would I want/need that?" just to downplay the usefulness of a product. 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.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll agree there's no perfect solution yet for the multiple mailbox issue. One of these days, someone will get it right. But I'll
Re:Umm (Score:5, Informative)
You haven't travelled much have you? Many cultures do not use toilet paper.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Umm (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Parent
I know this may sound stupid . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I know this may sound stupid . . . (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re:I know this may sound stupid . . . (Score:5, Informative)
The download page says you need 10.4+ to run Google Desktop so you're still SOL.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re:I know this may sound stupid . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Parent
Another anecdote (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Agreed, dashboard is over rated (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
I found that Apple *had* loaded Dashboard with 3 widgets that are quite handy, and for which I'd either had third party addons installed or icons in my dock since X.1.
i.e. : Calendar Widget::MenuCalendarClock
Calculator Widget::Calculator Icon in Dock
Weather Widget::Meteorologist > Forecastfox
All in all a quick F12 to do a calculation, or check stats when the bro
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
I suspect it's squarely aimed at switchers who don't know any better. Anything to wring that little bit more advertising revenue from their users.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
- 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
Re: (Score:2)
Rather than Spotlight? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Edit for accuracy, please? (Score:3, Insightful)
The referenced Tuesday was yesterday [arstechnica.com], not six days from now. It's completely understandable that some stories are posted late, but is it too much to ask that they be edited to remain factual?
Comes down to performance (Score:2)
I already get the GMail search effect, since I download a copy of my GMail messages to Apple's Mail application via POP3.
So, the real test comes down to how effective the Google syste
Re: (Score:3)
http://hiram.nl/ipsedixit/artikel/801/the-boolean
but why? (Score:2)
QS (Score:2, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Third party desktop search toolbars are dead? (Score:2)
Third-party search toolbars also seem like a major step back in terms of security: you have yet another thing with access to your local filesy
Unedited (Score:2)
> "Google on Tuesday will release a Mac version of Google Desktop.
Call me old fashioned, but I am not sure that posting the submissions "unedited" is as good an idea as CmdrTacco seems to think. Any semi-literate person knows that you may have to supply additional information to keep the context of the citation correct. In this case, the missing part would be "Julio *wrote* the day before yesterday". As it is, the citation wrongly refers to next week, although it meant to be th
What would have made more sense... (Score:3, Insightful)
[1] http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Carbon/Co nceptual/MDImporters/Concepts/WritingAnImp.html [apple.com]
Re:What would have made more sense... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: I don't have a Mac (Score:5, Funny)
Thanks, I haven't laughed that hard all week.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Good lord, and that's only if you're adding things to an existing PC! That's almost $1200 right there! Note I'm not talking about pond muck systems, but a system that actually would allow an apples to apples comparison
Exaggerated prices (Score:2)
The copy of Vista that comes with most PCs is good enough for the average user and it's absorbed into the price of the system so you won't even notice paying for it. Hardware prices for Vista capable machines are dropping all the time, but even now a PC with Vista is much cheaper than a Mac. There are many improvements from XP to Vista so forget everything you know about XP. Once you have tried Vista, I doubt you will want to use a Mac again. Don't take my word for it though
*I'm* missing *your* point? (Score:2)
Is this site just anti-Microsoft, or what?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Mac Minis can be had for $500 or so. The cheapest Vista PC is about $400 and won't run anywhere near the speed of a Mac Mini, runs Vista Basic (basically XP w/ DRM) and isn't the system I'm comparing. The low-end are AMD Semprons, by the time you hit the first dual core systems, you're in the $600+ range.
I don't care for Vis
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Not that big a problem, really (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Both. Just build yourself a daemon service that does indexing in background and then add frontends to it (CLI, GNOME/GTK, KDE/Qt). Since frontends will just query a service (via DBUS f.e., or even TCP socket) I would be extremely easy to build multiple frontends for it. Maybe even document the protocol used to query and wait for open source community to build frontends theirself.
Or you could use FreeDesktop.org standard pro
Beagle (Score:2)
http://beagle-project.org/Main_Page [beagle-project.org]
Re: (Score:2)
Honestly, I tried the apple "MAIL" app when I got the Powerbook, and found it limited and frustrating in the extreme - using it IS a sacrifice.
After taking a crack at Thunderbird, then Entourage, I have settled on Gyazmail, [gyazsquare.com] which really is a nice bit of work.
(The power supply for t