Google Desktop, Sidebar and Dual Monitors

Wendy Wickham has been posting about her Google Sidebar experiments. So, in the interest of trying to be more of a geek and trying to play hard with all the new tools that are out there, I went ahead and installed it.

My first impression was, why bother? It's just my iGoogle page in a sidebar.

I found a good LifeHacker article expounding on the wonders of the Google Sidebar. And it is kind of cool. But....

I think the reason I may not be getting it, is that I work with two monitors. Dual monitors lets me have Mozilla open on one screen, while working in another application on the other screen. I know when there's something new to read (gmail, rss) and I always have easy access to search.

Other benefits of working with two monitors:

1) Have a source document open on one screen and be writing a proposal/storyboard/script on the other.
2) Watch an online Adobe Connect presentation in one screen and blog about it in the other.
3) Read Outlook messages in one and find a file in the other.
4) QA an application in one window, have bugtracker open in the other.

The uses are endless and I don't think I could ever go back to a single monitor. With monitors so cheap these days, why not try it yourself?

Back to the Google Desktop -- I'm playing around a bit with the searching capabilities and am seeing the light. Tony Karrer has often written about his complete reliance on desktop search.

I'm struggling a bit with figuring out how to set the preferences so that it searches where I need it to search (I save most of my files to a shared network drive; not locally). And I think I just figured it out: set your preferences and then let your computer sit idle for a long time so it can "crawl" and create an index.

So the search feature -- I get that and I'm sold. Use Google searchbar to search for documents and files on your desktop, on your network, in your email, on the web. Very useful feature. Does this mean I will never again use Windows Explorer?

I'm not sure if the Sidebar would make me more productive or just more distracted....I don't think I'll become a widget creator myself. I agree with Wendy and her IT buddy: it completely bogs my machine down.

Google Docs

I played around a bit with Google Docs this weekend. Well, I actually worked with Google Docs this weekend. Inspired by recent posts from Harold Jarche and another one today from Wild Apricot on using Google Docs in nonprofits (thanks to Michele Martin for the link). I took some work home without having to lug my laptop. It was lovely.

I was talking to my CTO about my experience. His concern, of course, is that now that the information is not stored centrally it's harder to manage. And the fear that someone who shouldn't get to it will. Aah -- corporate control. Always the issue.

Now I see that you can publish a Google Doc right to my blog, so I'm going to try that now. Not sure if it gives me any advantages over writing a blog entry in Blogger. Any one done that? When, where and why?

Update: When I published the post, it didn't have a title. I don't see in Google Docs a way to do this. It appears to just title your document with the first few lines of text. Nor can you add tags when publishing to your blog.

Please PLEs Me

I've just been dying to use that title.

Anyway, who of you Google users noticed today that your homepage is now iGoogle?

I did about two hours ago...but I thought it was just a cute Google thing, the way they make the logo all green and earthy for earth day. It's not that, it's actually the Race to Personalize the Web. PLEs here we come.

(I just listened to Stephen Downe's PLE presentation, so the topic is fresh on the brain).