Quickfire is a recently released experimental Firefox add-on that lets you find and launch Mac applications straight from Firefox's address awesome bar. Just like in Quicksilver, Spotlight, and any other launch helper, you need only to type a couple of letters to get it going. It doesn't provide icons for each application, but it will show you the root folder where it's stored, and loads up the app as soon as you hit enter.
If you're on a Mac there honestly isn't much use for this, since the built-in Spotlight can do the same thing with a very simple and easy keyboard shortcut of its own. However it can, occasionally, come in handy if you're in the middle of using some Web app and realize you want to fire up a certain outside application, since the result suggestions load up the same way they do for site history and bookmarks.
Once installed, Quickfire lets you launch desktop applications for Firefox's 'awesome' bar.
(Credit: CNET Networks)YouTube has announced a new series on content for political candidates, called Spotlight. Candidates will be able to ask the YouTube community a question and monitor comments and video responses sent in from users. They'll then get a chance to respond to the group discussion later in the week. The goal is to provide an open forum for users to know candidates a little better, and for people to ask questions directly--an option that's historically been out of reach (outside members of the press or those involved in campaign events). The project is also taking advantage of a wide audience with YouTube's staggering user base and demographic of 18- to 55-year-olds.
YouTube's first video for the new Spotlight service
(Credit: CNET Networks)The first politician on the hot seat is Republican and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, with a 1-minute video titled "What Do You Believe Is America's Single Greatest Challenge?" There will be new politicians each week, leading up to the primaries.
YouTube's blog is currently recommending that users get "thoughtful and creative" with their video responses, although without basic moderation requirements, things could get a little out of hand. In contrast, MySpace's candidate solution is a little more glossy, with edited candidate pages and resyndicated campaign promotion material. That is, until the service's mock primaries in January.
It will be interesting to see who's up next.
One of the key benefits of using Google Desktop rather than the search functionality that ships with Microsoft Windows XP is its speed and online functionality. Vista has improved the built-in search, but for XP users, Google Desktop is a powerful search tool that does a much better job at helping you find things, even if they're online. This morning, Google released a version of its Desktop search client for the Mac operating system. Sure enough, the release has a lot of people asking why? After all, Macs have been shipping with Spotlight, OS X's built-in system-wide search since early 2005. What could possibly make this worth installing when a search function is already installed at an operating system level? We decided to give it a go with a Mac laptop lying around at CNET Labs, to see if it's worth using.
Search is managed with a widget that displays results.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Google Desktop installs quickly and will index everything on your computer's hard drive in a few hours depending on how many files you have. Also included in the indexing process is your entire Gmail account. Not included is data from other Google services such as Groups, Calendar, and Docs & Spreadsheets. The app is managed entirely in system preferences, where you can set which drives it should index, as well as files or folders you don't want it to look through.
To search for something, hit the apple key twice in brief succession. This will pull up a widget that you can type your search query into. Results come up as you type, and pop up at about the same speed as on Spotlight. It's also worth noting that if you don't have Google Desktop running, the keyboard shortcut won't do anything.
One thing that Google still insists on doing is using a Web browser to display full results; only a few will pull up a few in the search box. If you don't already have your browser open, Google Desktop will launch it, which is kind of a pain. If you're looking for e-mails or Web pages, this can be handy, but for local system files it just slows down the process. Spotlight is much easier to work with, pulling up a detailed results box as part of the application.
Google Desktop for Mac is a solid download, despite the fact it requires users to be running OS X 10.4 (which has Spotlight search built-in). Mac users who don't have 10.4 yet have likely been using tools such as Quicksilver and Launchbar to find and launch applications, files, and media. The Gmail integration is neat, but we would have liked to see them add integration with the rest of its office suite to make it a compelling alternative to Spotlight.
Google Desktop's indexing options. You can configure Gmail integration here as well.
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Basic program setting menu. Here you can configure things such as keyboard shortcuts and the quick search box.
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Taskbar integration. Unfortunately there's no way to do a search right from the taskbar, unlike Spotlight.
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The results page. Here you can see complete results from a search, split up by file type.
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