Aug 23, 2005

Google Desktop - good reinvention of the wheel

Like everyone else I installed Google Desktop v2 Beta. It’s quite possible I’ll even keep it installed. I’ve uninstalled the first version because I found I wasn’t using it.

I like this one so far - very nice implementation of the sidebar concept. I have a few plugins installed (web clips, scratch pad, e-mail, photos, stocks, weather, todo and system monitor).

There are two comments I have.

First, I’m still undecided on the wisdom of taking a significant portion of the screen for not-so-important information. Screen estate is still important and staring at weather in San Francisco or stock quotes is of questionable value. I’ve ended up setting sidebar to auto-hide, which kind of defeats its purpose.

The second comment is: yawn. 3 years ago I was using a program almost exactly like that that came from Microsoft Research called Stuff I’ve Seen. They had quite a wide internal beta inside Microsft and it was doing exactly the same thing as Google’s Sidebar: indexing all the files and e-mail and providing a plugin-based sidebar. The plan, I think, was to make this part of the next Windows release but I don’t think that’s gonna happen. Instead it formed into Microsoft’s Desktop search.

How many Ph.Ds do you need to come up with something really original? Apparently more than Google has hired so far. Let’s see what is Google most known for:

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