Google Desktop

If you like gadgets and have an inch of available real estate on your computer desktop, the Google Desktop Sidebar thingy is way cool. I downloaded it yesterday and thought I’d give it a whirl. I’m hooked already. It downloads my latest gmail titles/senders (with a little expandable drawer showing the entire email content), gives me a nice long list of news headlines (automatically updated frequently), as many rss feeds as I want, a scratch pad, a slide show of photos from my own computer (can close it or remove it if you don’t like it), stock quotes, and weather. There are a couple of other sections, too, but I removed them so I don’t remember what they are now. It’s worth a try if you like having easily expandable lists of things at your fingertips. Oh, it also catalogs everything on your computer, including your email if you choose, so that if you’re looking for some file or folder, you can use its little search box feature which is sooooooo much faster than the native Windows search function. (It doesn’t say anything about working with Macs...at least not yet.) I love this thing.