Google Releases Gemini App for macOS
Google last week released Gemini for Mac. I downloaded it to my desktop machine.
“Access Gemini from any screen on your desktop to clarify a topic, recall a formula, or brainstorm on the fly without opening a tab,” the website reads. “It’s help on demand.”
The news was shared on X by Gemini’s account, as well as Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
From a technical perspective, Gemini on macOS is not lazily built in a web wrapper; it’s a native app, built with Swift. Google’s screenshots show Chrome for Mac, as you’d expect, but I’m one of seemingly few who really and truly prefers Safari to Chrome for web browsing. As for accessibility, I reached out to Google PR with a question about whether Gemini for Mac supports accessibility features. A company spokesperson responded via email “we support accessibility features.” I followed up with an inquiry about exactly what those features are, but haven’t yet heard back as of this writing.
As someone who uses ChatGPT on the Mac virtually every day, I’m glad to have another native chatbot app on my computer(s). I tend to go back and forth between ChatGPT and Gemini, as I have no experience with Anthropic’s Claude. I find OpenAI and Google’s respective chatbots to perform similarly overall; I don’t find myself strongly preferring one over the other beyond presentation and user interface. Both of them have proven more than competent as an assistive technology when doing research and generating bits of CSS/HTML code for Curb Cuts’ design. As I’ve written here before, to have ChatGPT automatically generate CSS after giving it a prompt, for example, is a far more accessible way to moonlight as a wannabe web developer when I can’t (or don’t want) to traverse umpteenth webpages for the information I seek. Of course one must be diligent about spotting errors and other hallucinations, but for the most part, both ChatGPT and Gemini work with aplomb. I even keep both in my Dock.
