{"id":175,"date":"2006-01-10T07:59:14","date_gmt":"2006-01-09T20:59:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/01\/10\/initial-thoughts-on-google-pack\/"},"modified":"2007-09-10T18:37:33","modified_gmt":"2007-09-10T08:37:33","slug":"initial-thoughts-on-google-pack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2006\/01\/10\/initial-thoughts-on-google-pack\/","title":{"rendered":"Initial Thoughts on Google Pack"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Google have announced <a href=\"http:\/\/pack.google.com\">Google Pack<\/a>, which is a convenient way of installing (and keeping up-to-date) a suite of free tools, while making sure that Google manages to slip in whatever product it is currently pushing. <\/p>\n<p>I looked at the suite of Google tools included; the standard Google suite you would expect (Google Desktop, Google Toolbar for IE, Picasa, Google Earth). Google have built yet-another-photo-based screensaver, and have thrown that in.<\/p>\n<p>The non-Google offerings? <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\nFireFox (Not a big surprise; <a href=\"http:\/\/news.zdnet.co.uk\/software\/applications\/0,39020384,39173536,00.htm\">Google has been seen kissing Mozilla behind the bike-sheds.<\/a>)<\/li>\n<li>Adobe Acrobat (An sound, but obvious, choice)<\/li>\n<li>Ad-Aware (Good thinking)<\/li>\n<li>Norton Antivirus (Not the one that I use, but a reasonable choice. Except this is trialware, not freeware, which makes me wonder how many machines will have rotting protection updates in 6 months!)<\/li>\n<li>and nothing else&#8230;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>That&#8217;s it?  I was expecting an <em>initial<\/em> list at least twice as long!<\/p>\n<p>Last time I built my machine, I took the time to record what I had installed. It was an vain attempt to detect what it was that was causing my browser to lock up (especially with the right-click).  At this stage, Google Toolbar is still one of the main suspects!<\/p>\n<p>So let me sift through the list (with well over 100 entries) to make some suggestions for you, Google.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>iTunes and Quicktime<\/li>\n<li>ISO Recorder<\/li>\n<li>Password Safe<\/li>\n<li>Filezilla<\/li>\n<li>Java<\/li>\n<li>DivX and\/or Xvid, and other popular codecs<\/li>\n<li>WinZip &#8211; although, Windows handles a lot of this now.<\/li>\n<li>Plugins for the Google Toolbar, such as Larry&#8217;s Any Text File Indexer<\/li>\n<li>An IM-client, like Trillian<\/li>\n<li>Throw in some fonts &#8211; everyone loves a few more fonts.<\/li>\n<li>Shockwave\/Flash Player<\/li>\n<li>A bit-torrent client, like Azureus<\/li>\n<li>GhostScript\/GhostView<\/li>\n<li>Powerpoint Viewer<\/li>\n<li>Notepad replacement (e.g. Notepad++)<\/li>\n<li>Skype, or other softphone<\/li>\n<li>RealPlayer &#8211; the free one<\/li>\n<li>You could always throw in a few free games.<\/li>\n<li>I use Office, but a StarOffice option wouldn&#8217;t be a bad idea if you are trying to use this to attack Microsoft.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Don&#8217;t get me wrong; I&#8217;d probably try out Google Pack next time I built a home machine. Hopefully, though, that will be long enough away for far more applications to be included.<\/p>\n<p>p.s. How about a Developer Pack? Include a grep and a diff, an XML editor, a Hex editor, a copy of Python, Perl, the JDK, Apache, mysql, etc.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Google have announced <a href=\"http:\/\/pack.google.com\">Google Pack<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>I was expecting an <em>initial<\/em> list of software at least twice as long!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[31,25,47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geek","category-insufficiently-advanced-technology","category-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}