I’ve been following what goes on at Google in the way of new products and services that they offer by reading The Offical Google Blog for quite a while now. It was in reading that blog last October that I caught the announcement that Google had created a new blog specifically for Mac Users called The Google Mac Blog.
Well today as I was reading The Google Mac Blog I found out that Google has released a ‘beta’ Google Desktop for Mac. It’s not just a port of the Google Desktop for Windows product in that the two file systems are fundementally different but it does carry over some features such as the capability to index Gmail and web history but it is very much a Mac program in look and feel.
If you’re at all familiar with QuickSilver you’ll see similarities in the way the interface is designed, where it appears on the screen, and where they are triggered on the keyboard (QuickSilver is Control-Space whereas Google Desktop is Command-Command) it is not the “launcher” utility that QuickSilver is. It comes off functionally to me as an enhanced Spotlight.
Certainly it is very much worth the look.
April 7th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Pierre Igot in his betalogue blog (http://www.betalogue.com/2007/04/04/google-desktop-a-pretty-lousy-mac-os-x-application/) doesn’t think to highly of Google Desktop at all. Checkout his article Google Desktop: A pretty lousy Mac OS X application.
Having used it for only a few days now I’m not at all down on it like he is but I’m thinking “okay, it’s good, but not great”. It still still needs work and I’ve been wondering these past couple of days,… is my Mac slowing down? And I’m wondering did Google Desktop do that or is something else going on.
Jerrald Hayes