Google Mail Clients for Google Desktop

It has been a long time since I last dabbled with Google Desktop. In fact, I think the last time I installed it was back in March of ‘07 when the version 5 beta came out. It’s a neat idea, but just not something that ever “sticks” with my day to day habits.

However, I caught a blog post earlier this week mentioning a new Google Mail Desktop gadget and decided that it looked interesting enough to try. After all, I’m always interested in checking out new or alternative ways to use my email accounts.

I quickly ran into a snag though: My home machine is (currently) running Vista x64 and Google Desktop doesn’t support 64-bit windows. That is a bit disappointing. But, stiff upper lip and all that… so I installed it on a 32bit XP machine instead.

First off, the new Gmail gadget is actually pretty useful and works as advertised. One neat option not mentioned in their blog post is that you can right-click and “collapse” the widget to just show the title bar and unread mail count. That’s handy if you have multiple accounts as it saves some space in the side bar or desktop. Just double-click to the collapsed widget to re-expand it. Alas, double-clicking the expanded widget does not collapse it though.

Down side? Just running 3 mail gadgets in the side bar uses a minimum of 40MB. If memory is a concern, this is probably not your best bet. Especially with various firefox and windows tray gmail notifiers out there.

I’m going to keep Desktop running for a few days and see if it gels with me. To lighten the load, I’ve disabled the desktop search options – never need ‘em so no sense in having them run.

Perhaps more later… Oh, and if you’re a Google Desktop user, I’d welcome suggestions on useful gadgets.

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