It's once again been much longer than planned since I last posted, but I have some time off of school and work, so here goes.
Sitting on the right-hand side of my desktop is a nifty application from Google called, appropriately, Google Desktop (download here). This comes with several different plugins to provide various bits of information, including weather reports, stock updates, news articles, and RSS feeds, among others. It's also my understanding that 3rd party plugins can be devloped, so possibilities are endless. It also features Google Desktop Search, which scans your hard drives initially for documents, emails, web histories and such and then keeps an eye on things from that point forward. The advantage of this is that you can find information that's come across your desktop much more easily and more comprehensively than is possible with Windows' built-in search function. Google says your desktop results are kept completely private and are invisible to the people and Google, and I believe them.
For me, Google Desktop has proven to be most useful docked to the right-hand side of my screen, but set to auto-hide. Even though I have my desktop resolution set to 1280 x 960, I found that it took up too much space to leave visible at all times, and there's a nifty alert feature that lets you know when a new RSS or news item is available, even if the sidebar is hidden. At the top of the sidebar, I have my RSS feeds, which I pretty much use only for family members' and friends' blogs, so I can easily see when a new post goes up. This feature automatically adds any RSS feeds it finds, so I had to go through and weed out the feeds I didn't want and turn off the auto-find feature after a while. Next I have my news items. If you let it, Google Desktop will customize these based on what you read most. For example, I have a lot of tech articles that show up, along with some health, business, and general interest articles, and no sports articles. The third plugin I use is a nice little notepad. Simply type reminders or whatever here and they're automatically saved. Finally, I have What's Hot and Quick View minimized at the bottom of my sidebar. What's Hot shows what Google thinks are the most popular items on the web and Quick View is similar to Windows' own Recent Documents list, but can be customized to show popular and recently used items, instead of just the latter.
Well, that was much longer than I'd intended to geek on about this particular program, but that's okay, it's a useful program.
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