arstechnica.com— Almost two and a half years after the debut of Google Desktop for Windows, the Google team has unveiled a beta version for the Mac. We took it for a drive before the general release.
Apr 4, 2007View in Crawl 4
also i'm wondering with the press release from google saying they were going to use your built in microphone to monitor the ambient noise in your room how much sense it would make to add built in software, isn't the search feature in safari enough? i suppose i can always just disable the microphone in the control panel.
One more way of searching for things. I'm using Butler as a search tool and launcher - Quicksilver seemed to cause too much problems and slowdown. Spotlight is slow on a 2.5 year old iBook. Perhaps Google Desktop does better. It has indexed so far only 58 000 files, and works so far quite ok as a search tool. Integration to the Google browser search is nice, at least.
How long will this be in beta, another 2.5 years? Google needs to understand beta trials that exceed 2 years are generally detrimental to the cause, rather then beneficial, it just allows for feature creep and want for more (like Gmail).Anyways, for Mac and even Vista, the need for a 3rd party search tool is a bit moot. I'm actually quite happy with Vista's searching, and at least it respects the indexing options on my system. I don't like a search tool which delves into areas of no interest, or I wish to keep hidden. Combined with the "smart" search folders on Vista, while not as robust as on OS X, I have already created smart folders for all the content I want quick access too, like photos, music, videos, software projects, etc.Google is about 2.5 years too late releasing a desktop tool for OS X, and have yet to even hint at something that might enhance or surpass Vista.
@atrain15:you're right, quicksilver doesn't explicitly filter by content. but spotlight does. and say i'm searching for an e-mail, i can just bring up quicksilver, type mail (or even fewer letters, depending), then i have access to my inbox or any other mail folder, which i can then search. same goes for itunes. if i used iphoto, i could probably search it the same way.an extra program and 40mb of ram doesn't seem worth it to do something quicksilver and spotlight can do better.
mobilehavocApr 4, 2007
Welcome to 2004.
deepfogApr 4, 2007
also i'm wondering with the press release from google saying they were going to use your built in microphone to monitor the ambient noise in your room how much sense it would make to add built in software, isn't the search feature in safari enough? i suppose i can always just disable the microphone in the control panel.
juuhaaApr 4, 2007
One more way of searching for things. I'm using Butler as a search tool and launcher - Quicksilver seemed to cause too much problems and slowdown. Spotlight is slow on a 2.5 year old iBook. Perhaps Google Desktop does better. It has indexed so far only 58 000 files, and works so far quite ok as a search tool. Integration to the Google browser search is nice, at least.
kannedApr 4, 2007
No thank you. I'll stick with Quicksilver and Spotlight.
rgznApr 4, 2007
i am sticking to spotlight! i dont want some bloatware in my app..got that google?!
topher06Apr 4, 2007
How long will this be in beta, another 2.5 years? Google needs to understand beta trials that exceed 2 years are generally detrimental to the cause, rather then beneficial, it just allows for feature creep and want for more (like Gmail).Anyways, for Mac and even Vista, the need for a 3rd party search tool is a bit moot. I'm actually quite happy with Vista's searching, and at least it respects the indexing options on my system. I don't like a search tool which delves into areas of no interest, or I wish to keep hidden. Combined with the "smart" search folders on Vista, while not as robust as on OS X, I have already created smart folders for all the content I want quick access too, like photos, music, videos, software projects, etc.Google is about 2.5 years too late releasing a desktop tool for OS X, and have yet to even hint at something that might enhance or surpass Vista.
esquire360Apr 4, 2007
I love me the quicksilver, if you haven't used it check out these tuts on utube<a class="user" href="http://youtube.com/results?search_query=quicksilver&search=Search">http://youtube.com/results?search_query=quicksilver&search=Search</a>
mediaphileApr 5, 2007
@atrain15:you're right, quicksilver doesn't explicitly filter by content. but spotlight does. and say i'm searching for an e-mail, i can just bring up quicksilver, type mail (or even fewer letters, depending), then i have access to my inbox or any other mail folder, which i can then search. same goes for itunes. if i used iphoto, i could probably search it the same way.an extra program and 40mb of ram doesn't seem worth it to do something quicksilver and spotlight can do better.