Monthly Archive for May, 2006

Picasa for Linux

Published
by
richard
2 years, 4 months ago
in Linux and Photos
. 0 Comments

Just when I’ve become more and more frustrated with KimDaBa, or KPhotoAlbum as it’s now called, Google comes to rescue and releases Picasa for Linux (For some reason or other they don’t let any ISP outside the US access that page, but the fine people filling up the comments on Digg have found direct download links. Just scroll down a bit on this page.)

Picasa was bought by Google a while ago, and then released for free, but they didn’t bother releasing it for anything else than Windows. Well, they have now. The Picasa version for Linux comes bundled with WINE, so it’s not a Linux native. It does integrate with Gnome and KDE, but it doesn’t adopt any of the font settings, which is due to above mentioned use of WINE instead of native libraries. Unfortunately, that makes for some pretty awful fonts and window UI, especially compared to the rest of the app, which is designed to be extra-smooth.

Picasa jagged font

Note the dark-grey background and the jagged font, then compare it to this overall design of Picasa:

picasa

Apart from this, Picasa works fine. It installed without any problems on my Kubuntu Breezy Badger system, using the Ubuntu package. It is a bit slow right now, but I’m quite sure that’s due to my antiquated computer.

All in all, I’m delighted the fine people at Google are reaching out at their Linux clientele as well.

By the way, a few hot-headed people are getting all bent out of shape because Google is actually releasing a product for Linux and has not open-sourced it. I think it’s a really good idea to bitch about efforts like the Google Picasa one, if you’re trying to keep Linux behind Windows for all times. The 225 patches the Picasa team has submitted to the current WINE code alone show how much of a win-win situation this is for everyone.

Browster - not for everyone

Published
by
richard
2 years, 4 months ago
in Search
. 2 Comments

Browster offers previews of search results. Doesn’t sound too exciting, but enough so to warrant a little testing. Unfortunately, even though they are not much more than a browser extension (which in Firefox usually is a platform independent affair), they offer their services only to Windows using folk. Which I’m simply not.

But they seem to have a good marketing division, who’ve devised a devilish scheme to disguise their shortcomings:

browster dual installer

How great is that? A single download file for two browsers. And it’s an .exe file too! What a sales pitch! Not compatible with a large chunk of the early adopter crowd, but no need to click download twice when choosing to install in two different browsers (which is the most obvious thing a mainstream-user does with a new service, right?).

So I guess Valleywag are right after all. Browster is a dog, or at least just as useful as a dog when it comes to providing services for your non-Windows surfing experience.

Tabblo - Online Photobooks

Published
by
richard
2 years, 4 months ago
in Photos
. 0 Comments

While there are a number of photo-sharing websites out there, most notably Flickr, there has apparently been a dire need for a service that lets you create static photobooks with all sorts of text.

Massachusetts based Tabblo has decided to fill that scandalous void.

I had a look at the service.

The first pleasant surprise was their integration with Flickr, which means you don’t actually have to upload any photos yourself, because they’ll simply copy all of your Flickr ones over to Tabblo.

Importing takes a while, but I took the service for a spin with a few already imported photos.

The organizer is quite basic, but it works nicely with drag and drop:

So I dragged and dropped a few pictures and off I went to selecting a layout:

tabblo layouts

It’s really quite versatile, because it has layouts that are more suitable for a big bunch of pictures as well as for just a few.

Finally I went on to edit the text for the final tabblo. There’s a floating sidebar which holds all sorts of valuable tools, but it kept getting on my nerves by jumping up and down when trying to use the scrollbar:

tabblo edit

I managed to tame the sidebar beast, and created my first tabblo. Click here to look at it.

In the end, Tabblo is quite a well-done app, and while it’s not exactly as revolutionary as they made it out to be in their initial press-release, I can see it is a nice little tool for people who just need a quick and easy way to showcase their stuff.

Tech.Stormgrass is powered by WordPress 2.6 and K2