Google makes progress with Desktop for Mac

Stephen Withers
Monday, 04 June 2007 12:44

Business IT - Technology

A revised beta of Google Desktop for Mac supposedly squashes several bugs and introduces various feature improvements.

That's very welcome - I was delighted at the responsiveness of the initial release of Google Desktop on my iMac G5 compared with Spotlight's sluggishness, but the instability it brought in the form of freezes and even kernel panics were unacceptable.

Version 1.0.1's release notes didn't mention any fixes in this respect, so I didn't bother with it, but 1.0.3 claims to fix critical bugs that "cause the machine to either crash or become unresponsive" as well as plugging memory leaks, so I'm giving the program another chance.

Among the improvements are faster crawling after a restart, compatibility with Camino 1.5 (not everybody uses Safari or Firefox) and some tweaks to the updater.

One potentially very useful feature is an HTTP based API for desktop search. Google Desktop's built-in web server can be asked to deliver search results to a program running locally. The results are returned in XML format, which is generally easier to handle within a program or script compared with trying to 'scrape' the required data out of HTML results intended for display in a browser.