Picasa for Mac
Picasa borrowed a lot from Mac's elegance and simplicity, but it was only available for Windows (and emulated in Linux). Mac users can now finally install a native version of Picasa from picasa.google.com/mac/ and enjoy one of the most easier to use software for photo management.
Picasa for Mac makes it easy to manage large photo collections and helps users make professional-looking edits without any technical knowledge, including:
* A drag-and-drop photo collage tool that gives users control over layout and content * A retouching brush to wipe out scratches and blemishes - and repair old photos * A slideshow movie maker that uploads users photo montage videos to YouTube with a click * Smart auto-cropping that guides users on how to zoom in on their subject * And, auto red-eye removal.
Many of us take pictures so that we can show them to the people we care about. Picasa for Mac integrates seamlessly with Picasa Web Albums, Google's free photo-sharing site, which offers features like name tags - the ability for users to automatically organize and share their photos based on the faces in each picture.
If you have a Mac and you manage to install Picasa, tell what you think in the comments.
Blended Google Mobile Ads
Google Mobile Search started to display short text ads in the middle of the search results page. The mobile interface mixes web search results, news, images and local businesses, but Google displays the ads after the list of regular web results. Google separates the ads using a different background, but it's weird to see the ads mixed with search results.
Here's an example for the query [love] as displayed in Opera Mini:
Sergey Brin said in an interview from 2004: "One thing that's important to us is the distinction between advertising and pure search results. We make it clear when something is paid for. Our advertising is off to the side and in a couple of slots across the top. Ads are clearly marked. There's a clear, large wall between the objective search results and the ads, which have commercial influence."
Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:04:55 +0100
On Gmail's Success
Paul Buchheit, the ex-Googler who created Gmail, remembers how difficult was to convince people that Gmail has the potential to become successful.
We starting working on Gmail in August (or September?) 2001. For a long time, almost everyone disliked it. Some people used it anyway because of the search, but they had endless complaints. Quite a few people thought that we should kill the project, or perhaps "reboot" it as an enterprise product with native client software, not this crazy Javascript stuff. Even when we got to the point of launching it on April 1, 2004 (two and a half years after starting work on it), many people inside of Google were predicting doom. The product was too weird, and nobody wants to change email services. I was told that we would never get a million users.
Once we launched, the response was surprisingly positive, except from the people who hated it for a variety of reasons. Nevertheless, it was frequently described as "niche", and "not used by real people outside of silicon valley".
Financial Times reports that Gmail has about 100 million users and the growth rate is still significant: "[Gmail] has been gaining ground in the US over the past year, with users growing by more than 40 per cent, compared to 2 per cent for Yahoo and a 7 per cent fall in users of Microsoft's webmail."
Even though the competing mail services improved their offerings and storage is no longer an important differentiator, Gmail still offers an unmatched user experience. After using Gmail, you'll no longer understand why Yahoo Mail places the "Send button" above the message, why Yahoo Mail thinks it's more important to show news and weather information instead of your inbox, why Yahoo Mail still charges for features that are available for free in Gmail, why Hotmail shows a large banner at the top of the page or why you can't auto-forward mail to a non-Hotmail account. Gmail made so many right choices that it's easy to ignore some of its quirks, downtimes or bugs.
As David Pogue said back in 2004, "Even in its current, early state, available only to a few thousand testers, Gmail appears destined to become one of the most useful Internet services since Google itself. Gmail is infinitely cleaner, faster, more useful, more efficient, less commercial and less limiting than other Web-based e-mail services."
The perception about Gmail changed a lot over the years, even though Gmail didn't remove controversial features like contextual ads or conversations. From the paranoid "Google reads your mail" or the cool factor of having a Gmail invite, Gmail became successful by continuing to improve and to exceed people's expectations.
Gmail's homepage from 2004
Mon, 05 Jan 2009 19:37:02 +0100
Android for Netbooks?
Android is not just an operating system for mobile phones and it's likely that it will be used for netbooks, ultra-portable laptops which started to become popular last year. Daniel Hartmann managed to install Android on an Asus EEEPC 1000H "with nearly all of the necessary hardware you'd want (including graphics, sound and the wireless card for internet) running". It's also interesting to see that some Android code references Asus Eee 701, the first Asus netbook.
VentureBeat speculates that we could see the first netbooks preloaded with Android in less than a year, but Android could become a general-purpose operating system for any kind of devices. Installing apps for your car or TV is not too far fetched.
This post details how to install Android on a netbook, but you shouldn't try it unless you understand the process.
Google Viewer for Gmail Attachments
Last month, I mentioned that Gmail links to a new viewer for PDF attachments, powered by Google Docs. It turns out that Google's viewer doesn't work only for PDF files and Google intends to replace the outdated "view as HTML" option with a proper application.
Right now, you can use Google Viewer for PDF, DOC and PPT attachments, but the option is enabled by default only for PDF files. Here's to open Word documents and PowerPoint presentations in Google Viewer:
2. Click on "view as HTML" next to the attachement:
3. Edit the URL by replacing view=att with view=gvatt.
4. Open the page.
You'll be redirected to a page that has the following address: http://docs.google.com/gview?attid=0.X&thid=THREADID&a=v (X is the number of the attachment, while THREADID is a value that identifies a Gmail thread).
Google Viewer automatically generates images for each page of your document, you can zoom in/out, there's a basic search feature and you can select text.
Why would you choose this instead of opening the attachment in Google Docs? It loads faster, the document doesn't clutter your Google Docs dashboard and it looks much better. The viewer doesn't inherit any limitation from Google Docs: it includes pagination and it uses the original fonts and layout settings.
