Monday, January 5, 2009

Picasa for Mac

Google:

Picasa for Mac looks and works almost exactly like Picasa on other platforms.

In other words, they ported it using a cross-platform toolkit, and it doesn’t look or work like other Mac applications. Also notable: it doesn’t run on PowerPC-based Macs.

Update: Dan Benjamin:

I’m hoping that a future version of Picasa might be designed for Mac OS X, as opposed to running on Mac OS X. Now that would be a killer app indeed.

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[...] J. Tsai reports that Google is using a cross-platform toolkit, which also prohibits Picasa from running on PowerPC [...]

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that the lack of PowerPC support is because Google is using a cross-platform toolkit. Perhaps they have some Intel-only image processing code. Perhaps they didn’t feel like testing it on PowerPC-based Macs.

Are you sure it's a cross-platform toolkit? While the interface is a bit wonky, there are multiple nib files in the app bundle's resource directory. Compare that to Google Earth, which is written with Qt and has no nib files.

Kevin Walzer: It doesn’t seem to be Qt like Google Earth. Rather, I think they’re using their own toolkit, which on the Mac side is primarily implemented with Carbon. There are some nib files, but they seem to only be for auxiliary dialogs. The main user interface seems to be driven by some .fen XML files in the “runtime” folder.

also un-mac-like is the first dialog forcing you to import photos (there's no way to cancel this step so you can pick which folders from the app)

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