Where Have All the Google Desktop Gadget Christmas Trees Gone?

The Google Desktop blog brings word of three christmas-themed Google Desktop Gadgets for download. Unfortunately they no longer seem to be accessible. Has Google removed the Holiday section? It looks like it has.

They only had Christmas tree gadgets that were user-made. Sure it would have been nice to see a Hanukkah gadget, but it’s a lot less fun to light a candle than it is to decorate a Christmas tree.

(Word of the gadgets via Ionut Alex. Chitu)

Google Calendar Gadget Updated

The official Google Calendar gadget has been updated for Google Desktop. You can now view events from multiple calendars, which is something that has been bugging me. They also color-coded scheduled events using the colors you set in Google Calendar. And it fixes a bug.

I’m glad to see them update this gadget so that it is now actually useful. Seeing events from your main calendar was never useful when it ignored many events until they were close to occurring.

Source: Inside Google Desktop

Google Pack Available, Customizable

The Google Pack is now available. By default it includes: Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, Google Pack Screensaver, Google Toolbar for IE, Firefox with Google Toolbar, Ad-Aware SE Personal, Norton Antivirus 2005, Adobe Reader7. You can easily remove items from the pack, or click the add or remove software link to customize the pack further. There you can add the Google Video Player, Google Talk, RealPlayer, Trillian, and GalleryPlayer.

When you download the file, you are downloading the Google Updater. Running it will list the applications it is downloading, and you will see the progress of each download. It can also tell what packages you already have installed, and whether there are updates to it. After each file is downloaded it is then installed.

Google Desktop 2 Beta: Web Clips

The new Google Desktop 2 Beta has quite a few remarkable features, but the Web Clips deserves a special mention. As you browse the web, the Web Clips panel in the new Sidebar is updated with news from the sites you are visiting. It can tell what blogs you visit most often, and display the recent posts from them in the Web Clips panel.

Google Desktop 2 Beta

Google has release Google Desktop 2 Beta. The biggest new features are the Sidebar, a panel on your desktop which provides convenient access to various personalized information, and Quick Find, which allows you to search for an application to run from within any application. What seems very promising is the ability for the beta to search Gmail, and for the Sidebar to include RSS feeds. Check out the features page.

So to recap: Google Desktop Search can now index Gmail messages, it can encrypt your search index, and it can index additional drives and networked folders.

I am just starting to uncover all of its features, but this is exciting me to no end. This beta is by far one of the best things to have come from Google.

Google Desktop Search Updated

The Google Desktop Search application was just updated to build 20050513. I know this because my firewall alerted me that GoogleDesktopUpdate.exe wanted to run and then I looked in its program folder and saw the new version waiting to be loaded. After I restarted the new version went active and the old version was put in a temp folder.

I don’t yet know what is new in this build, and there isn’t anything online about it yet. It could just be a performance update. I compared two cached versions of the main Google Desktop Search page and the (beta) text next to each language other than English in the dropdown menu has been removed. Does this mean those other languages are no longer in beta?

Google Desktop Search: Windows Explorer Integration

A month ago I wrote about desktop search applications and their enormous promise. My main gripe was with the lack of a way to integrate a third-party app into the Windows Explorer search. My prayers have finally been answered. ByteGems has released a Google Desktop Search Plug-In for Windows Explorer that replaces the old Windows File Search with Google Desktop Search. Thank you ByteGems.

Desktop Search and Me: or how two applications can coexist

For the past few months I have been using the Google Desktop Search application and have been generally satisfied with the results. What’s great about the program is that it crawls my information in the background and gives me results integrated with any Google search I perform. I particularly enjoy the new web cache feature that works with Firefox because I am able to find caches of pages that have disabled browser caching. This was useful in the recent Google X debacle because my browser didn’t cache it but there was a version or two from Google Desktop Search.

While GDS is great when integrated with Google web search, I prefer Ask Jeeves Desktop Search as a standalone product. What I absolutely love about Ask Jeeves Desktop Search is that it attaches itself to the “Open File” window allowing me to easily search for the file I am trying to open. It then opens the file I select in the application I am working in. And the Ask Jeeves Desktop Search lets you choose to index your information gradually or quickly. Definitely a must-have application.

One thing I would like to see is one of these desktop search applications allowing me to set it as the default Windows search service. Why do I have all these great applications and still have to use the built-in Windows search because I sometimes forget I have the other applications?

it’s good to be the king

Pimp some hos (all in fun of course). Get a free alternative to Internet Explorer or find out why you should. Google’s Sergey Brin is still cryptic about a possible Google browser. And Google just released a tool that allows you to easily search for files on your own computer and O’Reilly has a review.

It seems that people are actually getting their free ipods. G4TechTV even investigated them and things "seem" legit. Though others are reporting that users get spam and delays.

And I will give out a Gmail invite to the first 2 people who comment on this post requesting one. More will be available in the future if all goes well. Don’t know what Gmail is? Find out what all the fuss is about.

And for all you game fans: Halo 2 might have been leaked online, ahead of its November 9th release date.