Mac moves closer to the cloud with Google Docs integration

By Stephen Withers
Friday, 04 July 2008 12:26

Opinion and Analysis

One of the delights of Mac OS X is the way Spotlight provides rapid (at least on modern hardware) desktop searching. But what if some of your documents are 'in the cloud'?

That's where a new piece of software called Precipitate comes in.

Created by Stuart Morgan of Google's Mac team, Precipitate provides a mechanism for Spotlight to import data from Google Docs and Google Bookmarks.

It works by making local copies of the online files, which Spotlight then indexes. Precipitate then regularly polls the Google servers to see if any changes have been made to the documents, and updates the local copies accordingly.

If you select a Google document from a list of Spotlight results, it is automatically opened in the browser - though you you will be diverted first to Google Docs' sign-in page if you aren't already logged in.

Precipitate, which is implemented as a System Preferences pane, also works with Google Desktop for Mac.

Announcing Precipitate, Morgan said "If you're like me, some of your information is in the cloud and some is on your machine, and you don't always remember what is where. That can make it frustrating when you try to use your favorite local search tool to find something. Isn't the whole point of search that you don't have to remember where you put things?"

And Morgan has plans to expand Precipitate's feature set. Please turn to page 2 to see what he has in mind.