Comments on: Google Desktop for Mac: Gmail, MailTags

By: Scott Morrison

Scott Morrison — Mon, 18 Jun 2007 01:37:54 +0000

This incompatibility has been resolved in MailTags 2.0 — It was more of an issue in MailTags 1.x importer than in Google desktop — Google couldn’t do anything about it until I fixed the issue. (Which I did in February before the Google Desktop for Mac release)

By: Tom Moore

Tom Moore — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 17:41:38 +0000

Shortly after installing Google desktop, and concluding it didn’t add much except an unfamiliar UI, I found my Mail searches of message contents had stopped working. Then I noticed Spotlight’s main UI was not searching emails either. Then my backup program croaked, which I traced to a 1.5GB log file generated by mdimport as it started and crashed five times per minute (or was it per second). Eventually all this traced to an incompatibility between MailTags.mdimpurter and Google desktop. Removing MailTags importer puts things back to normal (I think).

One heck of a lot of inconvenience resulted from “too many cooks in the broth”. Maybe Google desktop need to play better with Spotlight and Mail, MailTags.

By: Jon

Jon — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 07:11:42 +0000

@Tim-

I tried it a second time–without MailTags, and while I didn’t experience the same flakiness, it was still weird–but in the end, I realized that my hard drive is just too full to use it right now. I posted a bug report feedback on Google’s pages, and I recommend others do the same. I think this utility has promise, and the more feedback, the better the product will be.

-Jon

By: Jordan

Jordan — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 23:17:47 +0000

After all my talk about not needing it, I did give it a whirl and was disappointed myself. Same problems mentioned above about the indexing process, but also the fact that it appears to not be doing what it says it’s supposed to do in terms of indexing filevault according to the way the FAQ says it does. I think I’ll let it bake for a little while longer.

By: Tim Gaden

Tim Gaden — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 22:04:42 +0000

@Jon, I started to experience some really weird things too. I’ve gotten rid of it.

By: Hone

Hone — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 06:48:02 +0000

I actually tried this out

While it’s search was pretty speedy , simple and cool (3 keywords I’ll bet Hawky here likes) there is a few design decisions I don’t think were very smart. That of figuring out wheter it is still indexing or not and how long is to go on the indexing . Also the ability to pause and resume the indexing process. Of all the reports of it being buggy and slow the majority of reports appear to be from users who haven’t realised that No the indexing ain’t done yet

GD’s index appears to be more effiicient than Spotlights which is a very good reason to use it. But it’s currently barely beta software (alpha quality more like)……

By: Jon

Jon — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 18:38:38 +0000

I’m not sure about GD. I installed it, and while it was neat to see my files on my Google searches in my web browser, I use Spotlight only in Finder windows, and QuickSilver for the rest. But what really concerns me is that I discovered last night, that I could no longer empty my trash–something about not having sufficient priveleges or access to some of the files–without it telling me what files. To make things weirder, even with only one file, I could not do anything to empty my trash… Then, I tried launching Disk Utility to repair my permissions–and it wouldn’t finish launching. I couldn’t get a window to appear. I next tried Disk Warrior, and it wouldn’t open either, with an “unexpected problem.” Also, for the past few days, my hard drive has been thrashing constantly–all day and night. I booted from my secondary admin account, and was able to get both a permissions repair to run and from external, a repair of the hard drive (which didn’t turn up anything). What was really weird was that I still couldn’t empty the trash from within my main account. I finally remembered that GD was running, and I turned off indexing, rebooted, and discovered that I could empty my trash again. I did so much there at the end, that it’s hard to say that removing GD is what fixed my problem, but I do know that nothing else worked until I turned it off… In the end, I just went and uninstalled the whole thing–it’s not worth it to me. I wonder if anybody else has had weird problems like this…

-Jon

By: Ignobilitor

Ignobilitor — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 01:51:14 +0000

Beware: this thing is a cycle hog…

By: Scott

Scott — Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:47:31 +0000

Don’t forget, Spotlight in Leopard is going to get even better.

I have run Google Desktop on my Windows server at work for at least 2 years. While there is nothing wrong with it, the other little things it does are not serious or necessary. For a Mac user to encumber his system with a second indexing tool is pointless, I think. And when Leopard comes out, that should be even more true.

By: Jordan

Jordan — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 15:21:37 +0000

Fair enough, I wasn’t being flippant, it was an honest question. :-)

How big is the google index data? My spotlight data is already 850mb, I’d hate to have another gig for google. Maybe I should just try both out and switch to whichever I like better.

Thanks for the comments.