I spent a couple of days last week playing around with some new toys. I had been hearing a lot about the relatively new Google Desktop (GD2 for short) and just how cool it is, and since I am all for trying and using new toys, I decided to give it a run. GD2 basically has two functions: indexing and searching of files, and a sidebar for quick access to information. The indexing did not appeal to me at all. I know exactly where every file is on my computer that I have interest in (very anal about file placement) and I prefer to use online email that I access from anywhere. I was really excited about the sidebar though. I think it is a throwback to using RipBar back in 1998-99. But I use RSS, have a half dozen email addresses I monitor, do the notes app, etc, and I liked having everything in one little program. Of course, when I noticed the little program was using over 30meg or resources spread out on 4 process I became a little less enchanted with it. I had also heard that Gtalk would integrate with it, so I started playing with that. By integrate, they mean search chats, not become part of the sidebar like I hoped.
The resources got to me, and I decided that I would not mind spending that much if I could embed a messenger into it. But I could not even get Google's own messenger to link in, so there was no hope for MSN, AIM, ICQ, or YIM. But I was also into the sidebar mood now, so I went looking. RipBar, which I mentioned above is way outdated, costs money, and does not sport any of the features I was looking for. Sadly, nearly everything I found seemed like a free RipBar clone. That is, until I found Desktop Sidebar. This sidebar seemed to have everything I wanted: it could support all my messenger protocols via Miranda IM, checked all my mail (roughly), it had a wide variety of pluggins for greater cusomization, and it seemed very polished (the sidebar, not necessarily the pluggins). Sadly, it wieghed in at 38 meg between miranda-im, and the sidebar, and I simply hated the mail pluggins. I also had some fits with Miranda at first, but quickly got it up and running. I could have chucked Miranda and the mail checkers and used the "application capture" plugin to grab Trillian, which apparently a lot of people do according to the forums, but that felt even more clunky.
So yeah, I ended up just killing everything I tried and fell back to just using Trillian for the messaging, mail checking, and system stats. I am leaving the RSS and ATOM feeds for Opera to handle since the Trillian pluggin only handles RSS .9, and that is fairly limited. And I will use ATnotes to my notes again since Trillian has zero notes functionality. However, in all my searching, I did find a new pluggin for Trillian to handle my audio streams so I don't have to run Winamp anymore... guess that is a plus.
