(Post 30/05/2006) Since its initial release in October 2004, Google Desktop has become increasingly popular with the masses. That popularity, along with a desire to monetize the application, apparently has resulted in a large team of programmers at Google working on improvements to the application. The result? Google Desktop 4, just three short months after the debut of version 3 (of a very-extended beta).

Google Desktop 4 brings us Google Gadgets, which are basically an update to Google's panels, but with extra eye candy. If you have used Mac OS X or Konfabulator, they should look very familiar. Like the Panels, Gadgets can either live in your sidebar, or be pulled out to float above or below your other application windows, Konfabulator-style. Upon installing Google Desktop 4, users are presented with a window chock full of gadget options (there are nearly 160 of them available as of the launch). These range from the usual clock and calendar gadgets to the more esoteric like Cricket scores and a virtual flower pot. Your Gadget settings can be saved online for a quick restore in the case of system crashes.

Google Desktop has also made improvements to the Sidebar and the Desktop applications. Indexing is improved, as is the documentation for the whole package. There are also a couple of options that should make sysadmins happy, such as the ability to disable Search Across Computers. Users can now remove deleted files from search results or even nuke their entire index from orbit and have Google Desktop index anew.

Weather change from Google Desktop 3 to 4. Now with 50% more transparency!

This latest update also offers integration with some of the new Google features launched since the advent of Google Desktop 3 oh so long ago. Google Calendar is nicely integrated into the sidebar, with users being able to create and view calendar entries directly from Google Desktop. You can also see the latest from Google Videos and watch them via a Google Gadget.

All in all, Google Desktop 4 appears to be a solid update. The addition of Google Gadgets is definitely the highlight and appears to be targeted directly at Yahoo, which acquired Konfabulator in July 2005. There's also a lot of eye candy here, and it's an angle worth focusing on for a second.

When the Sidebar made its debut, it was resource-light (at least compared to Konfabulator) and spartan, as one would expect from the company responsible for the minimalist search page. Now things are getting pretty and eye-catching. Is the graphical goodness of Google Gadgets intended to keep users of Google Desktop from being swayed by the eye candy (and sidebar) in the upcoming Windows Vista?

Of course, the privacy concerns we voiced at the release of Google Desktop 3 still hold true—the Search Across Computers feature still requires that copies of your indexed files be transmitted to Google's servers, even if it is then deleted at some point after it's downloaded.

by Eric Bangeman
(theo arstechnica.com)