After far too long a wait, today, Google released the first beta of Picasa for Mac. Picasa is a free, powerful photo management tool that includes many photo editing operations that the Mac native iPhoto lacks. In addition, Picasa is tightly bound to Picasa Web Albums, the first 1GB of which is also free, in contrast with Apple’s MobileMe, which runs $99/year.
I have chronicled, on my own blog, my wish for Picasa for Mac for about 3 years now. As you can see, the post continues to receive comments and remains, to this day, one of the most visited entries on my site. Clearly, there is demand for this product.
What I believe makes Picasa such a successful product is just how powerful it is. Although iPhoto works very well on the Mac and the iLife integration across applications is priceless, the fact remains that for serious editing and effects, the Mac user must venture outside of iPhoto. Picasa, on the other hand, has an entire suite of tools for photo finishing. Furthermore, Picasa features Google’s search tool, a bevy of organization tools, a plugin system using “buttons,” out-of-the-box integration with Gmail, Blogger, Picasa Web Albums, and the ability to make collages, movies, and more. In fact, there is little doubt that Picasa is a much more robust application that iPhoto.
There are some missing features in this beta: Geotagging didn’t make the cut, nor did webcam capture, screen capture, and screensaver. Also missing are the ability to order prints, an HTML export, and the fantastic Picasa Photo Viewer. Most of these features are certainly tied tighter into the OS, and while they will be missed, they are by no means deal-breakers.
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What remains to be seen is whether or not Picasa is stable, whether or not it’s fast, and whether or not it can handle large photo libraries. I know people with well over 15,000 photos in their iPhoto collection, and the application is solid. Since Picasa doesn’t store it’s own library, but rather, merely catalogs photos elsewhere on your disk, we’ll have to see whether this translates into a performance advantage or disadvantage. It remains to be seen if Picasa for Mac can go toe-to-toe with more mature, native solutions. That said, count me in as one of the many waiting to find out.
…or is Google deliberately giving both Windows and Mac users fully-native versions of Picasa, while giving Linux users mere Wine “improvements” to get the Windows version running in Linux? All of the sudden, Google’s “support” of Linux by helping to port their Windows version over to Wine seems like something to just shut Linux users up.
“All of the sudden, Google’s “support” of Linux by helping to port their Windows version over to Wine seems like something to just shut Linux users up.”
That is nothing new. Google has always favored Windows first, OSS second. All of the apps were available for windows first and use Wine for the linux versions. The only reason people seem to think that Google supports Linux is that it uses Linux. Google also sponsors the Summer of Code projects. In general however, Google is about as friendly as Apple or Microsoft.
Google did not develop Picasa, they bought the company that developed it. So this has nothing to do with Google. It would have been nice if they improved Wine rather than shipping their own custom version of it tho.
Well, they did send all their changes back to mainline Wine. If Google’s version works better, it’s probably because they stick to a version they know works. Wine is a rapidly-changing beast, so it’s not too surprising if some things break in new versions.
Are you sure it is native? doesn’t look native to me. It doesn’t seem to use any of the native OS X widgets. It could be pretty much ported using Wine but with hacks to render the menu in OS X menubar.
It definitely doesn’t look and feel native — it looks a little bit like really bad GTK theme. The scrollbars are particularly weird. But upon looking in the bundle and noticing that it uses breakpad (which is also used in firefox, chrome and last.fm), dcraw and keystone (for the updater), I cannot discover anything. The main executable is a carbon thing, and there are a number of nib files around. There are no tell-tale signs of statically linked toolkits either, although there are many references to windows-specific code (especially registry handling) left.
Not sure what to conclude from that — apart from that it looks and feels totally out of place and sort of handles icky.
Native in the sense that it’s a mac app, not a “crossover” like solution.
Doesn’t DarWINE handle everything that WINE handles?
As soon as I saw the requirements for Intel processors, I figured they’d just did the simplest of porting to get Picasa on Macs through WINE, which is about what we also got on Linux, it seems.
This means a lot of people will have downloaded it, saw the look of it, complained about it, and removed it by now. “It’s not a Macintosh application.” they’ll whine, because it doesn’t look 100 % like iPhoto.
I’m happy to see Google applications run on Linux. I don’t understand why you’re so negative about applications that make use of wine. The fact is Picasa runs quite well with wine, which is a testament to the many thousands of hours that the wine developers have put into their project.
Linux users whinning about not taking the whole attention? even with their sub 1% desktop market share?
You don’t say.
Okay, maybe it doesn’t follow the official Apple interface guidelines, and maybe the widgets aren’t 100% native…
But after playing with the Mac beta for Picassa, I’m pretty pleased with it. It does a lot more than iPhoto, and doesn’t leave me feeling like the software is treating me like an idiot “for my own good”.
The true test will be my wife, who has been unhappy with iPhoto’s limitations for some time now.
This is Win crap, I’m surprised they’re proud to release this.
Just to chime in here a little. Those buttons and scroll widgets are not native Windows either. They’re native Picasa, probably built from some other multi environment toolkit. This wasn’t a real native looking Windows application (where it uses native Win32 widgets etc.) – actually looks like something from Linux.
So don’t get too caught up into those scroll items (at least the scrollers on the left are Mac native, Windows version just has these custom jobs all around). The windows version doesn’t have a tab interface for Import and Library either (that’s different). The folders colors, appearance and perspective are different from Windows as well.
Edited 2009-01-07 20:09 UTC
It sounds like you don’t have the latest version of Picassa for Windows. Those tabs are there.