I just tried out Google Desktop and was rather disappointed. It comes preloaded with a monstrous sidebar that takes up about a quarter of the screen. You can set it to auto-hide, but even with that, it won't if there are dialogs open. And it claims to index chats. That's not true; it indexes chats in a cursory sort of way that's buggy (often splits chats into multiple events) and incomplete (only indexes chats from after the program was installed). It most certainly doesn't index chats archived in Gmail.
It's also a major risk for disk usage. Google Desktop creates copies of all files you view (including images and documents), and Web pages, if you have Web History indexing enabled, and caches these until a new version of the file or page is viewed. It doesn't appear to delete these caches, either; who knows how many gigabytes will be used just by these cached copies?
A few minor issues with appearance were present, such as Gadgets in the Sidebar defaulting to being skinny slots that are absolutely unusable. You must manually expand them, but figuring out how can be difficult. Also, the windows that appear for Expanded View and item previews (like for slideshows, Google Videos, or recent item browsing) default to a small, inadequate size as well, requiring resizing frequently as many Gadgets don't remember window sizes.
Google Desktop is a good program if you like toys (the Gadgets for the Sidebar range from useful tools to useless amusements). It might also be useful if you have thousands of files thrown into a flat-file arrangement (no folders). However, if you organize your stuff in folders and sub-folders, like I do, you probably don't have trouble finding things, and therefore this program is not particularly useful for you.
12 hours ago
