| Wednesday, April 4, 2007 |
09:18 - Missing something
http://daringfireball.net/2007/04/google_desktop_installer
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I just have one question: Isn't "Google Desktop for Mac" an oxymoron to begin with?
Wasn't the whole point of Google Desktop to provide an indexing mechanism for an operating system that didn't already have one (namely, Windows)? So you could do content-and-criteria-based searches and make Smart Folders and stuff, all the same features that have been built into Mac OS X via Spotlight for the past year and a half?
(Not that it could ever do it perfectly on Windows; a big problem that Google Desktop had was that because Windows doesn't have Unique File IDs or any other way of addressing files directly and not by path, moving a file from the location where it was when it got indexed causes Google Desktop to lose track of it and return "not found" errors, until you re-index your whole drive. Spotlight gets to serve up files regardless of where you move them to, because it doesn't rely on hard-coded paths in order to locate anything—same as with iTunes, in which it's also a lot harder to lose track of a file that's in the database on the Mac than on Windows.)
What additional value does Google Desktop bring to the Mac? Can someone explain this to me?
Especially since (as Gruber's analysis of Google Desktop's installer behavior seems to indicate) Google Desktop does what it does by hooking into the same background processes (such as mdimport) that support Spotlight's own database in the basic operating system.
When we were kids, my brother and I filmed a reenactment of Pee-Wee's Big Adventure, inspired in part by the fact that a friend of his could do a pretty good impression of Pee-Wee's signature laugh. It was a low-tech, ten-year-old production, with no editing, but we had a lot of fun doing it. We acted out and videotaped all the key scenes ourselves, using sofa cushions and Giant Tinkertoys and such as props; but when it came to scenes that required recognizable music, or montages and special-effects clips, we couldn't "improve" on the original movie in any way, or even approximate it—so we just played the movie in the background while we used Legos and Matchbox cars as the subjects under the camera. Even better were the scenes where the best thing we could do was point the camera at the TV and videotape a scene right out of the original movie.
That's what the phrase "Google Desktop for Mac" conjures up in my mind. Are you guys just videotaping the movie that Spotlight is already showing?
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Brian Tiemann
