Today Google announced the availability of Google Desktop for the Mac (download now available from Google’s Mac OS X software page). What’s Google Desktop, you ask? It is an application from Google, which indexes the contents of your hard drive (including applications, most files, PDFs, as well as web histories from Safari, Firefox, and Camino) and makes it searchable a la Spotlight. Our PC using friends have had this application for awhile, and it is nice to see that Google hasn’t forgotten about us Mac users.

Google Desktop for the Mac is a Universal application, requires OS X 10.4 or later, and is free.

I know what you’re thinking, ‘Why do I need Google Desktop if I already have Spotlight?’ That’s a good question, and since our friends at Google sent me a copy of Google Desktop to test drive I can answer it for you. Check out our gallery for a bunch of pictures, and read on for a full feature run down and my thoughts on Google Desktop.First off, I installed Google Desktop on a 2.16 GHZ Intel Core Duo MacBook Pro with 2 gigs of RAM. The app is Universal but I no longer have any PowerPC Macs, so I couldn’t test its performance on one. Installing Google Desktop is as easy as you would expect it to be: download the DMG, open it, and double click the icon to install. However, the application that launches when you double click that icon is also new. It is the Google Updater, your one stop shop for all Mac Google apps. The Google Updater gives you the opportunity to download and install Google’s other Mac apps (Google Earth and Picasa Uploader) while you wait. Frankly, I could do without installing a special application to download other applications. I realize that developers want to have more control over your entire experience with their apps, but these download managers can spiral into a Kafkaesque maze of downloading apps that only allow you to download other apps (I’m looking at you, Adobe). That’s a road that Google would be best off avoiding.

Once you have Google Desktop installed it starts to index your computer’s content. My past experience with Spotlight’s indexing led me to believe that I should just walk away from the MacBook Pro for a few hours while the indexing was happening. Luckily, however, Google Desktop does a great job of indexing in the background while you continue to work away on your Mac (I don’t know about you, but I’m a very busy industry pundit).

Once you start to work with Google Desktop you notice all the nice touches that Google’s Mac developers have incorporated into it. Have you set up Spotlight not to index certain files (that’s the list of locations under the Privacy tab in Spotlight’s preferences)? Google Desktop won’t index those files either. Want to save precious Dock space? Google Desktop gives you an option to display it in the Dock, in your Menubar (which I am using), both, or neither.

But that’s enough of the window-dressing, how does one use this app and, more importantly, why use it over Spotlight? Activating Google Desktop is as simple as clicking on the icon in the Dock or Menubar (if you choose to display them) or by hitting the default hot key: Command, Command (that’s hitting the Command key twice in a row). You can change the hotkey combo if you like, but for my money the default combo is very natural.

Source and More : http://www.tuaw.com/2007/04/04/google-desktop-for-the-mac/

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