Archive for September, 2005
New Google Freshness
September 4th, 2005
Google can do no wrong. OK…they can (*cough*…Google Accelerator), but it doesn’t happen all that often: most Google Labs products are pretty damned impressive…but none yet have been as impressive and useful as Google Desktop 2.0 and the new Google Talk beta. Sure, Google Earth and Moon are cool and a lot of fun to play around with…but they aren’t exactly everyday-use tools - and when I think Google, I think: simple, easy-to-use applications that deliver a LOT of functionality via clean, uncluttered interfaces. And that is exactly what Google Desktop and Talk deliver.
Desktop is actually the successor to Google Desktop Search, and delivers a lot more functionality than its predecessor. Sure, it can still index your hard-drives, and let you search for all manner of files via the familiar Google browser interface or a convenient little search box in your taskbar. But Google Desktop, in losing the “Search” from its name, has freed itself from being merely a Spotlight-esque search utility and has grown up into an awesome, configurable information sidebar rather similar to that supposedly promised in Windows Vista but completely free, highly useful, and completely free. The sidebar automatically arranges most maximized windows to fit in the desktop space not occupied by it (it’s about 100px wide, at the most) so it’s always on top and easily accessible, but can be collapsed into the familiar taskbar-level search bar with a single click–which is very handy when you’re working with an app such as Photoshop that benefits from being able to use as much screen realestate as possible.
The sidebar displays info in a number of configurable panels that hold displays for, say, recently-received Gmail messages, news headlines captured via RSS feeds, “web clips” (basically just another RSS aggregator), a scratch pad where you can scribble down notes to yourself (I use this constantly because it’s a lot smarter than littering your desktop with sticky notes), a little photo slideshow, weather reports, and others. There are plenty of other panels and plugins available; I’ve added a To Do list and an effective little system monitor, thereby making the Google Desktop sidebar an exceptional one-glance live information source. Some of the best plugins, however, deal with adding more diverse search options to the program, allowing Google Desktop to index archived chat sessions, text notes, and many other things as well as the usual MS Office documents, HTML pages, and so forth.
Google Earth is fun, and impressive; but Google Desktop 2.0 is fun and practical. It may be my favorite Google product ever…at least, until they release a Google audio player or a complete GoogleOS.
In the meantime, though, Google has another product available that I like a great deal as well, though not as much as Desktop 2.0. Google Talk is a chat program, obviously, and I don’t really engage in a whole lot of instant messaging anymore since my teaching schedule is so busy - but it’s still a great, if very very simple, IM program. At present, you have to have a Gmail address in order to be use it…but who doesn’t have a Gmail address anymore? In order to chat with someone, you search for them via their Gmail address and the system sends them an invite which they can respond to in order to open up a chat connection. A nice little security feature, there, rather similar to Yahoo! Messenger: if someone you just don’t want to talk to invites you, you can block them forever by never accepting their invitation, giving you the ability to screen whomever IMs you before you have to speak to them. Also, Google Talk uses the Jabber framework to connect to other chat outlets, so it can access Apple’s iChat and several others–you don’t necessarily need a whole bunch of friends all using Google Talk to be able to connect.
If you do want to talk to someone, though, that’s all Google Talk will let you do: exchange text messages. It’s as vanilla as vanilla can get and still possess some flavor. It give you a white box in which you and another party can trade text messages. The end. No file transfers, no graphic emoticons, no user icons, barely any text formatting….You just talk. And that’s it. I’ve read a number of reviews criticizing the release of such a “limited” (compared to, say, AOL Instant Messenger or Trillian) program - but, really, if all you want to do is talk, what more do you need? Google specializes in giving you exactly what you need without any frills, and Talk is a beautiful example of this design principle in action. In a world in which IM programs have become grotesquely bloated with stock tickers, RSS feeds, and other distractions, Google Talk is like a cool swig of plain ol’ water: simple and refreshing.
Now, I’m sure that as time goes on, Google Talk will most likely evolve to host graphic emoticons and user icons, as those are items that a lot of people really like, but…as it stands, Google Talk is ridiculously basic, unornamented, but still extremely functional. Just like the Google search window itself.
As long as Google keeps putting out products like these, a GoogleOS presence is almost guaranteed.
