Despite the fact that it has a nasty habit of slowing down my PC to the point that the CPU is at 100%, I am nevertheless starting to become a fan of Google Desktop's sidebar feature. This comes as a big relief to me as I was looking for some kind of desktop widget and I had finally run out of patience with Yahoo Widgets which was malfunctioning on a regular basis.

There are two apps which I have on my desktop sidebar which are rapidly proving invaluable to me in my quest to be more productive with my time. One is a notepad which I am using to jot down random tasks / thoughts. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I was using Todoist and that worked well enough. It even had a Gmail integration and an iGoogle module. But the reason I ultimately gave it up was the fact that I had to open an internet browser to use it. Sometimes if I am running another program, I first shut down all non-essential programs, including internet browsers. So if an idea comes to me that needs to be noted down, I want to be able to note it immediately. Not wait until the current task is finished and hope that I then remember to open Firefox then Gmail then write whatever I was thinking up to a hour before. So having a notepad on the desktop is extremely useful.

The other app that is rapidly proving its weight in gold is the ability to access my Google Calendar also without having to open my Firefox browser. I can add appointments via the Google Desktop "Quick Add" function and view my appointments on any day I choose, with the aid of a very cool looking pop-out window. The only downside to this feature is that I can't delete appointments from my Google Calendar using Google Desktop. For that, I have to open the browser and do it directly on the calendar website. I hope that Google offers a delete function in the future for users of the calendar app on Desktop.

Now what would be really good would be a Gmail module where you can send emails from the desktop without opening a browser. You can already view your emails on Google Desktop but the whole module is in a real mess. Old emails come first with new emails at the bottom (when ideally it should be the other way around) and emails that I normally have sent straight to archive appear in the desktop module with no apparent way to make them disappear. Can somebody please make a much better Gmail module for Google Desktop? I promise I'll be your pal forever!