Dave Winer is very excited with Google Desktop Search. It does seem like something pretty cool and I'll have to check it out. It just might bring Windows XP one step closer to OS X. Dave notes that GDS is not available for the Mac. This seems a bit odd to me, the fact that it is a fractional web server means there are several ways it could quite easily work on the Mac. Perhaps they're waiting for some of the core searching features to be baked in in Tiger. Or perhaps they're looking at the fact that very similar functionality has been available since OS 8.6 for the Mac - longer than Google's been around. Admittedly the idea of a fractional web server is a thousand times cooler than a native app and the expandability should be great for this kind of platform. It is quite disappointing that they don't support the browsers that many community leaders use - Firefox comes to mind.

Which brings me to another idea that's been bugging me lately. When will there be a browser maker for Windows that understands spell checking. Certainly Apple's decision to bake spell checking into the operating system makes it easier, but the #1 feature of Safari as far as I'm concerned is that it can spell check anything I type on the web - critical for web content authors.