Desktop Search Beta 2 & Google Sidebar: First impression

[john.ludlow.uk]

OK, been using this for all of a few hours, so these really are first impressions. It's also based on me having tweaked a few settings. I currently have the following plug-ins enabled: Email, News, Web Clips, Scratch Pad, What's Hot, Comics (from www.comicjunkie.com) and Weather.

Email:
Nice enough, though for some reason seems unpredictable in the results it shows. My work PC shows some (but not all) of my Outlook emails, and my home PC shows all the Gmail emails I've ever received, which isn't many since it's not my main account. There is no indication of which emails are read, all the titles appear in bold (which is harder to read), and the filters are very basic.

NOTE: I've just tried it again, and the title went to normal text. That didn't happen at work, it stayed bold. Not sure what's going on there. It definitely doesn't unbold when you just click on it, and that could be all you need to do in order to read it.

News, Web Clips, What's Hot
I've lumped these together since they all do a similar thing.

The News tab is annoying in that the only way you can configure it is by saying "don't show me items like this one". That's frustrating in that it's unclear what will happen. Does it add a filter? Does it remove that feed from the RSS reader? Where do all these feeds come from? I assume it's from the Google News service.

It's also annoying because I can only remove them one at a time. Most of the items in there by default are US-centric ones, and I'd prefer UK-centric ones. There's also a lot of business-related ones - I have to wade through stock reports to get to items I want to read. Perhaps being able to set a country and topics in the options would be nice.

The Web Clips is a nice feature, though why oh why can't you just call them RSS feeds? The Auto-add option is great... except it's just too eager. There's sites in there that I've only been to once or twice. I'm not sure if that's just because it needs time to sort out all the ordering and find all the sites I visit a lot, but it's annoying nonetheless. Maybe a slider to specify how often you need to visit the site in order for it to become considered "favourite".

The What's Hot tab just seems to be a static collection of a few tech news stories. Doesn't seem that useful.

One thing that might be better than three purpose-built tabs is to be able to add multiple tabs that work like the Web Clips one, but also allow you to set a custom name and icon. These could also trigger alerts like the News and Web Clips tabs.

Scratch Pad just seems like a text box. I guess that's all you wanted, though it'd be nice to have the option (or if someone could write a separate plug-in - maybe I'll give it a shot) to pull notes from Outlook. The same could go for tasks and appointments.

Comics (from www.comicjunkie.com) isn't a Google plug-in, but I'll briefly discuss it here anyway. This is nice, but the text could be arranged more efficiently and the padding reduced - in all, it just takes up a lot of room. Also, the items are sorted in a strange way. The '1 hr ago' under the image text seems to refer to the last time you checked for an update, and these are always the same.

The Weather tab has one massive problem. It currently asks for a US city name. Someone mentioned that you could actually type in UK cities, but it doesn't work for Leeds. It works for York, London and Bradford, but not Leeds. What gives? The temperatures seemed warm, so I wondered if these aren't actually US cities with the same names...

It needs proper UK cities, though.

Desktop Search, then. This is great, I love it. The only issue is one of indexer performance, and this could be sorted with better performance options (low priority threads, scheduling limitations, etc - in LookOut, I can specify a time range and indexing will only happen in this timerange). This isn't a massive issue, since it does a decent job of working out when the PC is busy.

On a side-note, tonight a running process on my work PC failed deleting some files. I haven't investigated this yet, but I suspect Google was indexing those files. It shouldn't be, since I'm sure I excluded that folder but I may have forgot.

Another thing: I'm of the opinion that all links that weren't opened in a browser should open in a new window. Otherwise, you can't predict which window it will open in, which might mean that it loads over something you were reading.

[john.ludlow.uk]

Oh, yeah, BTW, well done - it's great, despite my (hopefully constructive) criticism!

[Yinzelda]

I don't install this sort of thing for the fear of adware/spyware/malware there is so much of it about

Not saying Desktop Search Beta 2 & Google Sidebar contains any of the above though. It gets to the stage where you lose faith sometimes

[john.ludlow.uk]

I haven't noticed any spyware in GD. Prime target for spyware if they wanted to do it, but I haven't seen any evidence of them wanting to.

[Yinzelda]

Thanks John, that restores faith in me trying it sometime