It’s already been a few days since the new Google Desktop has been out and I had some time to play around with it. Besides a prettier button and a better looking quick search bar, there also have been some improvements to the API. For interested developers, there a few changes as stated in the Google Desktop APIs Blog:
* Radio buttons
* Combo boxes
* Sorting of clickable items based on click history within a gadget (see the ranking API)
* Built-in, styled text for buttons and checkboxes
* New properties to help you change the color and cropping of images
Moreover, Outlook search is said to be enhanced. Another cool feature is, that each gadget can be added as many times as you want, which could for example be used to manage separate to-do lists, having different count down timers or RSS readers.
However, the biggest change is the ability to add Desktop Gadgets to your iGoogle homepage. When Google Desktop started, there weren’t any iGoogle gadgets. Later, those iGoogle gadgets were made available to put on every webpage and also Google Desktop. Hence their name “universal gadgets”. But now, the Desktop Gadgets are getting kind of universal themselves: They can be easily added in the iGoogle Add Stuff dialog. Check them out here.
What does that mean for the gadget world? Google is pushing innovation and tries once more to break the barrier between the desktop and the web. True, you must have Google Desktop installed for running those gadgets on iGoogle, but not the full version. In fact, if you try to install a desktop gadget on iGoogle and don’t have the latest Google Desktop, you can install a “streamlined” version of Google Desktop with just one click. This version will do nothing but provide you the engine to display those gadgets. That means there will be no indexing of your hard drive and no sidebar. If you want to install the full GD, you can do that with a right click on the GD symbol and click “Enable Google Desktop”.
This is a very good solution, as everyone can enjoy their gadgets in iGoogle, even if they might not want to install Google Desktop fully. On the other hand, it will surely increase installation rate and thus, both products, Google Desktop and iGoogle are going to mutually profit from this latest move.
Here below is a screen, which shows some of the latest features. You can see three to-do lists installed: two on floating and one in the sidebar. Furthermore, there are two digg.com gadgets in iGoogle. The one on the top is a desktop gadget and the one below a native iGoogle one. Now it’s up to you to decide if you want to have the desktop one with many features like dynamically browsing through topics, or the static iGoogle gadget.
Unfortunately, you have a problem if you are dual booting other operating systems than windows, since GD for linux and mac do not support gadgets. However, you might solve this problem by having multiple tabs on your iGoogle hompepage. Then, you could only use Desktop Gadgets in some tabs, so that you can fully see all your iGoogle information on any OS or on a public computer on another tab.
This latest move of mashing the desktop and the web also lead to some speculation about a Google web OS once again:
“Masked” even made a mock screen of what it could look like in Google Groups:
It certainly looks like a cool idea, but in my opinion, it doesn’t use space well. Why would we want the old desktop metaphor again on the web? If you ask me, developers shouldn’t create web operating systems that are like common OSs, because you take with them all the good things, but also and weaknesses. I wouldn’t want to access my gmail or calendar in this little and cluttered way; most people use the whole screen for one app. iGoogle or eDesktop or whatever you want to call it wouldn’t get better, if you had to ability to freely move those items around, because only time and probably also space would be wasted. You can do that already with Windows as we know it. It’s not about reinventing the desktop, it should be about revolutionizing it.
It should rather employ and build out a system, which uses gadgets to show a lot of information on a small screen to get a quick overview and provides a full screen to work and if real interaction is needed. Yet, this is future speculation anyways, but I am sure we are to see many more cool improvements in the future.
