Picasa Arrives on the Mac | Hacker News Reader

Picasa Arrives on the Mac

picasa.google.com

25 pointsrscott16 comments

It's about time.

Unfortunately it's not very Mac-like.

Petition to Google and other cross-platform app-makers: please take the time to integrate with OS X; Mac users can already run PC apps with the help of VirtualBox, VMWare Fusion, or Parallels.

I can't even begin to describe how happy I am that it's not Mac-like, i.e. not dumbed-down to idiotic Apple UI idoms. I have an IQ above 50 so I don't need "OSX-style" UI for retarded Oklahoma children, thank you very much google for not ruining it. It works exactly as it did on Windows which is... like a hundred years ahead of iPhoto. I'm sorry kids, but Apple should be learning from Picasa how to make usable UIs, not the other way around. I hope this trend of ignoring OSX's idiotic idioms will continue.

I don't have to go back to Windows anymore!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! What a day... Christmas came late for me this year. :-) I'm sitting here, typing this smiling like a baby.

If google wanted to charge $1K for it, I would have paid it.

While your points are perfectly valid, your tone is distasteful. Do you talk like this in person?

For someone so happy to "[not] have to go back to Windows anymore!!!^69" you're clearly a Mac user. I find it puzzling that you've got such distaste then, for "OSX-style UI for retarded Oklahoma children". If you're so clearly against windows and use OS X and all of the applications it has to offer, aren't you really just saying a bit about yourself here? That or this is purely hypocrisy. For having such hate for "OSX's idiotic idioms", I find it pretty surprising that you use the platform at all.

At least you could have made your frustrations clear in a less vicious manner, and without making yourself look like such a tool.

That's what happens when you post a message 15 minutes after watching a football game, still drunk and excited. Should have known better. Answering your question, I'm on a Mac against my will [a number of reasons] and I rarely use anything else than Safari, Photoshop, vim and bash console.

The port might be via Wine, same as the Linux version.

I wish more Mac OS X application developers would port their software to other platforms, but sadly this is basically unheard of. With continued improvements to WxWidgets, GTK+ and (to a much lesser extent) Qt and XUL hopefully people will start embracing toolkits designed for true cross-platform development rather than developing for each proprietary API individually and considering other platforms as an afterthought.

What give you the impression that Qt doesn't have many continued improvements? If anything I get the exact opposite. The Qt devs are improving the OS X support significantly.

I'm sure it does, it's just out of reach of most small developers due to its commercial nature so is less likely to have as big of an impact as the others.

It will probably be difficult to get a big market share from iPhoto, even though Picasa has a couple of features that iPhoto lacks:

- (free and) easy sync with online albums (there's a plugin to push photos from iPhoto to PicasaWeb but probably not as complete as Picasa from what the video demo shows. I do hope Google keeps providing this plugin though)

- face recognition. I tried it on PicasaWeb and it was pretty impressive.

Where it could make a difference is on speed. The rest looks very similar.

I also wonder if it gives the same system-wide access to photos through the Media library that many applications use.

iphoto has a few plugins that easily sync with online albums (flickr, for one).

and now according to the macworld 09 keynote, iphoto 09 will have facial recognition and native flickr support.

Exactly. So, unless one really dislikes iPhoto, it will be hard to push Picasa to Mac users. Some will use it for sure but there's a big barrier to entry (which is not without reminding of the case of Internet Explorer on Windows...)

On the other hand, Picasa is free.

The thing is that iPhoto comes with every Mac. So, in a way, it's free too.

At last, although I can only hope it doesn't emulate the bloated crap that is Picasa 3 on PC.

It is disappointing that one of the fastest and most stable photo applications out there (probably its biggest two differentiators) has followed the path of all previous photo applications.

It's not just me either. http://groups.google.com/groups/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8...

Oh my god!!!!!!!!!!! I was just in process of configuring yet another Windows box just because I failed (after a year of trying) to find a way to deal with my ~5K of photos on a Mac. I tried everything imaginable and nothing came close to Picasa, so finally, finally google has come to rescue us!

Ugh... I can't remember when was the last time I was so happy about a piece of software... I only wish Apple could find more talent in Silicon Valley, apparently all their serviceable engineers are busy on Safari and OSX without anyone adequate available to work on iPhoto and Finder.

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