Computer magic

Picasa 3 released. Only kind of Googley.

I have the highest respect for Google’s products, their usability, and what they’re trying to do as a company. But I’m starting to see some warning signs that as they mature, offering me free, fast, ridiculously useful tools may not always be their number one priority. With that in mind, here’s my review of Picasa 3 and its online photo sharing companion, Picasa Web Albums. I’m only going to talk about the new features, because overall, Picasa is the best free photo program I’ve ever used.

Googley:
-Easy to upload and store full resolution photos to Picasa Web Albums, so that if someday I want to make a print of a friend’s photo, I don’t have to track them down and have them email the high res version, as is the case on Facebook.

-Slick slideshows, great collage templates, and neutral print providers

-LOLcat feature lets you easily add text over images

-magic retouch brush means your friends are about to get prettier

-Picasa already pretty great

Un-Googley:

-Google tries to get you to set Google.com as your default search engine during installation process. They already are my default, but it’s because they provide the best services, not because they pulled Microsoft-like tricks to get me to use their stuff.
They killed Hello, an extremely useful but little known photo sharing tool, to encourage a) more uploads to Picasa Web Albums and b) more upgrades to profit-generating hosting plans. Really? The company that revolutionized web mail with a gigabyte of storage is going to nickel and dime me on uploading full resolution photos?

-the “Download full album” button is excellent and will hopefully spare you the days of going through your parent’s Snapfish albums, right-clicking on each image. But it only works in Internet Explorer on a PC. You have to have Picasa installed, and even then Firefox won’t do the trick. This isn’t very clear in their help files, either.

-They flat out copied Facebook’s face-tagging. It’s a creepy feature on Facebook, which at least gives you granular privacy controls, but I don’t know how I feel about Google itself storing this info directly.

-Still no Mac support! Maybe they’re worried about iPhoto, but they shouldn’t be. Picasa’s way better.

-Picasa Web Albums is the second least inspired name in the Google Universe, trailing only iGoogle.

Microsoft just plain gives up

No, really. Their new ad campaign flat-out admits that the word-of-mouth about Vista is that it’s terrible and slow. They actually show people saying this.

Microsoft’s clever spin is that these people haven’t really used Vista yet, and would actually love it if it weren’t for everyone they know and trust telling them not to buy it. So they disguise Vista and present it to these newbs as the next version of Windows (which, back in the real world, people are already clamoring for specifically because of how terrible Vista is).

And lo and behold, these people turn out to really like Vista when they look at it in a focus group setting for a few minutes on what is likely a souped up machine.

The ad then implies that even though these people couldn’t recognize Windows Vista after it’s been out for A YEAR AND A HALF, you should be swayed by their opinion that it’s “faster” and has “the newest features that I’ve seen“.

You can watch Microsoft’s valiant effort at the lamest hidden camera ad campaign of all time at http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/.

Oh, and for what it’s worth, I used and enjoyed Windows for years, and up through XP found it superior to Mac. But Vista is just absolutely terrible. It is bloated, will bring decently fast computers to a crawl, and is completely off the charts when it comes to unneccessary frustration and annoying warnings and bubbles.

Looking around, it appears I’m not the only one who thinks this is terrible marketing and an affront to basic intelligence. And so the war between huge sums of money and basic truth continues.

Did Free Slurpees take down Facebook?

In yet another sign that Facebook has assimilated much of the MySpace demographic, Facebook is down and I’m putting my money on the free Slurpee gift causing traffic spikes. Facebook has had a number of promotional gifts recently, but this one ties in with an ACTUAL FREE SLURPEE, which is apparently enough to take down some pretty powerful server farms.

More firehose please

My half-hearted attempt at an information diet has been thwarted by Nicco’s latest project, News Junk (http://newsjunk.com). It aggregates the day’s political news from a bewildering variety of sources. But what makes it great is that they eschew the Google News approach and rely on humans to choose which stories get posted. That way the same AP release doesn’t show up 95 times. Prepare to be addicted.

Also, for syndication they’ve got RSS, Twitter, FriendFeed, and you can embed the headlines on your site.

Goodbye Hello…we hardly knew ye

Picasa is Google’s terribly underrated and until recently, completely unknown photo editing software. Which means the number of people who knew about Hello had to number in the hundreds. Hello was a great way to send photos to friends. You could carry on an IM conversation while flipping through photos, and you could even auto-follow your friend’s view so you could be on the same page. They got the full size pictures without any right-clicking or decompressing nonsense, and I’ve never met someone who couldn’t immediately figure out how to use it. My mother (and Kodak) lament that as cool as digital photos are, no one ever prints them, and as a result, the bonding time looking over a photo album has been replaced by hunching over a laptop screen (if that).posies for hello's demise

Google says they’re discontinuing Hello so they can focus on Picasa and Web Albums. Both are neat, but I’m not sure they’re going to fill the void.

Maybe this is all so Google can use the blue chip domain name Hello.com for something more worthwhile, especially now that Apple scored me.com.

Goodbye, Hello.

Never clip a coupon again

Am I the only person under 40 who looked at coupons? As I enter my fifth year as a grocery-shopper, I’ve come to realize that the coupon inserts in the Sunday paper exist primarily as a vehicle to advertise new and/or improved products rather than to save you money. The amount you save with almost any coupon in the insert is less than the amount you save by simply buying the identical store brand version of the product.

a la bugmenot

But like everything else, the Internet makes it better. Online coupon codes actually can save you some decent change, or at least get you free shipping. I saved about $100 by Googling ‘Helio coupon codes’ before buying my phone last year. But now you don’t even have to do that.

Install this Firefox plugin. Then when you go to buy something, it will display a little notice at the top of the page if a coupon is available for that store.

Or if you can’t figure that out, go to http://retailmenot.com when you’re about to buy something and type the store into their search box.

If you want to thank me, one-click me some MarioKart.

hullo hulu

OK so in lieu of blank empty space, I’m going to feature a few online tools that are awesome and that you should use.

First up (forgive me if this is terribly old news) is Hulu.

I originally wrote Hulu off when it came out because I assumed the traditional media players behind it would mess it up, and I hated the name, which is a pretty forced attempt at sounding like a scrappy startup. But Hulu’s pretty amazing. The ads are short, although I do wonder why companies like Priceline intentionally show you the same terrible William Shatner ad 4 times in 22 minutes. The site includes Arrested Development and The Office Season 4, as well as some full length movies, like The Big Lebowski. Finally, the player is very usable, with prominent links to embed, go full-screen, or dim the rest of the screen.

Better than tvlinks?

Encyclopedia of Life

Ultimately, the Encyclopedia will serve as an online reference source and database for every one of the 1.8 million species that are named and known on this planet, as well as all those later discovered and described.

The Encyclopedia of Life was inspired by E.O. Wilson, and specifically, his TED Prize acceptance speech where he pleas with us to pool our limited knowledge about life on Earth even as we destroy it.

On a technical note, the project’s pages include an intuitive slider that allows the user to instantly adjust their preferred knowledge level, and with it, the depth of information on the page. I know quite a few sites that could use an easily adjustable navigation like this.

slider.jpg

I can’t locate the working example I played with earlier, but you can see what I’m talking about on the Example page.

Just in time for Summer: the Ocean

Forget the iPhone.

The Ocean’s better. And available now. And ONE THIRD the price.

I haven’t been this excited for a consumer electronics, nay, any purchase, since I ordered the Nomad Jukebox back in 2002 (the iPod wasn’t working on PCs yet).

The Helio Ocean is at long last available for purchase, after driving me nuts with a vague “Spring 2007” release date. Click here for its features.

I’ve just scored a major victory in the battle for free time. The sooner I can do all of my email reading, blogging, Facebook-pruning, and other daily computer stuff while I’m bored on the bus and not in the precious free time at night, the better. I like to think that in the future, sitting in front of a desktop computer is going to be pretty old-fashioned.

And to add to my excitement, the Ocean is arriving via free two-day FedEx.

Even with all of the hype (and corresponding share price), Google continues to amaze me. A quick search for “Helio Ocean promo code” found:

The discount is as follows:
$75 off the device
$30 activation fee waived
$25 off your invoice for the first 4 months,
plus 1 month free of TV service.

A total value of $211

Via

Promo Code: B2BYMOD ($220 after discount)

If you order one and want to say thanks for the discount, put my phone number in the referral box on the order page and I’ll get a free month of service.

Bangarang!

ocean.png

April, Fools

Well, it’s my first April Fools Day in the professional world, but today’s Sunday so all the wild employment-risking office pranks I had planned will have to wait.

This being a day of rest, I started the morning with Facebook and Gmail and found that those pranksters had some fun of their own:

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UPDATE: Check out Lifehacker’s April Fool’s Day posts, such as how to cure seasonal depression with the Macarena.

And Google unveils broadband through your toilet – a “quick, easy and largely sanitary process”