dennis.ca

In what could only be construed as an early birthday present for yours truly, Google has finally released a beta version of Google Desktop for Mac.

In a fit of excitement I disabled Spotlight, installed Desktop, and indexed away. When my primary disk finished indexing in only a few minutes I started to wonder if I had made mistake. Indeed, at first glance Spotlight seems to cover a lot more ground than does Desktop.

Desktop does work very quickly, but for me personally, it has a few glaring problems:

1. No mail except GMail is indexed. This includes Mail, Thunderbird, and Entourage. Why?!
2. Search results aren't categorized, and there are no sort options. There are a lot of problems with Spotlight, but organization of results isn't one of them.
3. There are no instructions for removal.
4. There is no obvious way to disable the local caching of files.
5. No support for plugins.

Had I taken the time to read the documentation before installing, I probably wouldn't have bothered based on this tidbit from the Features page:

Google Desktop creates cached copies (snapshots) of your files and other items each time you view them, and stores these copies on your Mac's hard drive. As a result, you can often use Desktop to find previous versions of your files or ones you've accidentally deleted.

Let's hope that the 'beta' version is just that -- a first look -- and that the tool will continue to evolve and improve.

[Update 05-Apr-07] If you're worried about the intrusiveness of Google Desktop on Mac, you probably don't want to read this.