Download Squad

GoogleVideo is a superfast install. Searching video.google.com is pretty cool, but what's really cool is seeing all the really lousy video available. Try searching for os x86. Mayo anyone? Video searching brings up very strange results. "Doctor Who" brings up a Google Factory Tour video that looks interesting. Now what's with all the Long Beach City Council videos?

Google Talk is next on the block. Everything looks good, and Windows Firewall throws up a request to allow the registry change necessary. Amazingly, it makes it past the (corporate) firewall as well. That's pretty cool. Since I normally use the Mac version (Adium), I hadn't seen the loading of my unread gmail below... Well, that's depressing. Yeah, I know I've got 22 unread messages. I'm getting to it, OK? Next week I'll have to try the voice thing.

Ah Picasa. It's a lot of fun when you have almost NO images on your machine. Why there are the images for the video and audio driver tools... Ha! Corporate branding hidden in my C drive.
And I see my system tray has begun to sprawl out with little icons. Oh, there's that registry warning again... Picasa launches really quickly, and within about one second has all fifteen of the images on my drive indexed. Wait a sec, no it doesn't! There are two more images that don't make it in... In fact, they are JPG's made in Gimp that I've used on this here blog before. Huh. That's not good. I try to import them and nothing happens. Working in Picasa is already a frustrating experience, and don't get me started on some GUI issues. The scrollbars are funky, sitting in the middle of the bar at all times. Going to Import and cancelling means travelling from one corner of the screen to the other, while all other menu items are greyed out. In a few weeks, when I'm starting to build content, I'll see if I can integrate the camera import into my workflow. But for now I've got bigger fish to fry.

So how about the whole Earth? I've used Google Earth for a while now and just love it. The installer for Earth is the most Windowy installer yet, in that it looks pretty generic. But Earth fires up and it's love all over again. The only problem with Earth is that it's a huge time sucker for me. Only because I moonlight as a stalker. I stalk fjords. I've even got a poster of Slarty Bardfast on my wall. No, not really. But my high school geography teacher would be proud. Installing Google Earth reminded me of Google Moon. It's not a download, just a way to prove the moon is made of cheese.

Speaking of cheese, here's the Big Cheese Himself: Google Desktop 2, Electric Boogaloo. Wow, has this guy grown up! The sidebar is quite nice, showing a little slideshow of images found on my machine amongst all the other data in one nice column of noise. Although I notice it's just the My Pictures images. Seems like a little integration with Picasa would be nice, no? Weather shows Hawaii, which no doubt is nice this time of year, but a pretty long way from where I'm located. Wishful thinking? What I really dig are the Web Clips (or RSS snippets as we old-timers call them), News items, and integration with Google Talk. Can't wait to customize those news feeds, stock quotes, etc. Oh, and no need to install that Gmail notifier, because I have yet another reminder of my ever-increasing inbox... Seriously, do I need half a dozen ways to see how many emails I have yet to read?

By the way, Google, where is the Mac version of this? Pleaaase? I'll make you guys and gals the best tofu burgers you ever ate if you can do that one thing before the end of 2006, I promise.

Google's Compute? Fugeddaboutit- it's using ActiveX. I shan't sully my OS with allowing such foolishness about.

In the end all those installs and downloads only added about 4 or 5 seconds to my startup time. Firefox starts up about a second or two slower, but that's it. No doubt I'm using more RAM, more CPU, but from what I can tell, only a marginal amount more. What's missing from all this is more integration. I can see a new beginning in Desktop 2, and I hope the other Google apps start getting up to speed in this manner. Since Talk was pretty close after Desktop 2, it makes sense to integrate them. The sidebar is a welcome addition, I'll see what happens next week when I start using some more content creation apps. Will Blender hate it? Will Wink shudder at the thought of capturing Google Earth animations? Stay tuned...