I have been running with a sidebar (the aptly named Desktop Sidebar application) ever since I started using a dual monitor setup many years back. The added productivity from having so much at your fingertips certainly makes up for the small loss of screen real estate. I have tried a couple of different alternatives, but have always come back to Desktop Sidebar. My latest adventure was with turning on the sidebar in Google Desktop Search. The GDS sidebar would have worked perfectly for me, if it were not lacking one thing:
Auto fit.
The plugins for the GDS sidebar cannot be set to auto fit depending on the size of the information displayed. I use auto fit on several panels in my normal Desktop Sidebar, such as the Windows Live Messenger contact list and Outlook Calendar and Task viewer. These panels have content that varies in size, so they need to stretch when several contacts come online, for example. In the sidebar in GDS, if I get too many Live contacts online at a time, I need to manually resize the pane (which is a pain, with Google’s algorithms that resize every other pane to try to make room for your actions), or the contact list scrolls off the page – with no scroll bar!
If anyone can point me to how to turn on auto fit in the GDS sidebar, please do.
Greg Hughes writes about a great feature in Google where you can actually ask it what time it is in a certain place in natural language and get a response. This is cool, and something I’m sure I’ll be making big use of when traveling. Google keeps amazing me more every day.
I also make big use of Google’s conversion features where, for example, typing “11cm in inches” yields the actual answer. Handy.
I have been quite busy with CeBIT, as well as some other projects, these last couple of days, so I have been quite bad with updating the blog. Sorry folks, my bad.
Something interesting to note though – I was looking through my feed statistics just then, and by a rather large margin, Google Desktop is the most popular reader for subscribing to my site. This surprises me a little – I have tried (and since uninstalled) Google Desktop, and it is something I would not consider to be a full-time feed reader.
It might just be me and the way I read feeds, but I would personally limit the use of a reader like GD (which sits as a sidebar or floating in a widget-like fashion) to reading things like news headlines. It is not something that I would use for reading personal blogs.
For my feed reading endeavors, I use the excellent Sage plug-in for the equally excellent Firefox. It works with the live bookmarks feature of the browser, and displays the list of feed names in a sidebar. Clicking on the feed (which displays bold if there are unread entries) takes you to an attractive two-column page with the text of the feed. Simple, brilliant.
Here are a couple of posts about tweaking Google Talk. Nothing too ground breaking, but Talk has not been out very long, don’t forget.
Infinity Plus points out that Google is advertising for a “Sr. Video Conference Engineer” on Yahoo! HotJobs. The position could be for a Google Talk video messaging system, but probably just to manage Google’s internal video conferencing network. Time will tell.
I’m almost sick of hearing about Google Talk…
I don’t know about the rest of the world, but the media in Australia is doing some really bad reporting of Google Talk. The stories on the news are making out like Google is the first to implement any kind of voice communication on the internet – this is obviously not true.
I am a believer in giving credit where credit is due. What about Skype? What about Project Gizmo? What about all the other VoIP and messaging applications that came before Google Talk?
I don’t think Google Talk is that big of a deal. It may be in the future, but not right now. If Google’s hope of messaging system interoperability comes to fruition, then I will be a happy man. Right now though, I don’t have much time for a messaging application that doesn’t support file transfer, group conversations, or many of the other features that I have come to depend on.
I stand corrected, in a way, by Michael Robertson.
Google have announced that they are opening up the Google Talk service to other companies for interoperability. Although this doesn’t mean much now (as I can still only talk to those two other people), it may push the other IM companies to open up their systems as well. Project Gizmo already talks VoIP style with users on Google Talk.
I honestly hope that Google can create some interoperability, but I can’t see it happening. The current IM companies are just too arrogant, they want to own the world dominating IM system, and I think that is the way it is going to stay.
I installed Google Talk (beta), and overall it looks pretty nice. There is one thing though, I only know two other people that are using it right now!
You need to have a Gmail account to use it, and it will only talk to other Gmail users. To me, that is crazy. The IM market is already too over crowded. If Google was smart about it, Google Talk would be another Trillian, just smaller, lighter, and slicker.
I use MSN Messenger as my main IM, but it is a dog. If Google Talk would work with my MSN contacts, I would switch in a second. For now though, I think Google Talk is a little too late.
Just a quick note – Google have released a beta (like everything else they release) Firefox version of their toolbar.
