A Series of Tubes

Picasa, Google’s photo manager program, has finally been released for Mac OS X. This is absolutely great news for people like me, who despise iPhoto. iPhoto is ridiculously slow and inefficient in my experience, and (like a lot of other things on OS X) doesn’t really offer a lot of options on how behind-the-scenes organization will take place, so photos get hidden in big file trees, ending with the ‘Roll’, which is completely nondescript and unhelpful when looking for files. More recent versions of iPhoto are even worse, packing all of the photos into a single pseudofile: like a .app, it is actually a folder that has been given a file extention. This means that its still relatively easy to access your photos, but it makes actions like backing up photos or accessing them from other programs very difficult. In short, I don’t like iPhoto.

However, up until now, there haven’t really been any other options. Microsoft doesn’t really offer a built-in method of photo organization (or at least, they didn’t before Windows 7, which uses special ‘Library’ folders that can be used for photo organization, I think), so there are lots of programs out there for Windows photo organization (like Picasa). Since iPhoto is pre-installed on every Mac, nobody has really bothered to write up an alternative photo manager.

Picasa was my photo manager of choice on Windows, has traditionally been only for Windows and (infuriatingly) Linux. This has never made sense to me. Obviously, this is a very cross-platform application if it can be run on Windows and Linux, so how hard could it be to get it running on a Mac? Apparently very hard, as Picasa 3 for Mac is only in Beta at this point, and it has taken Google this long to get that far.

Anyway, the application itself is very nice. I like it a lot more than iPhoto for many reasons, but I miss some things from iPhoto. For one thing, Picasa is not really a photo manager as much as a picture manager. When you launch it, it scans your whole home folder looking for images, and displays them all, categorized by folder. It tries to sort the folders by date, but it seems to have a very tough time doing this (most of the years assigned to my folders are a year or two off, while some are dated 1990 and as far back as 1969…). I want a way to exclude folders entirely from its scan, but I have not found a way to do this yet. To make up for this lacking feature, Picasa categorizes its sources and allows you to minimize the ones you don’t want to see (for example, I have Albums, iPhoto Library, and one other specific folder opened, but the main folder hierarchies are minimized, because they add a lot of noise).

Picasa doesn’t really organize at all behind the scenes, it seems to just want to display the pictures as it finds them on your machine, and leave the organization to the user. I like this more than iPhoto, because it gives me complete control over organization and makes things a lot easier to find (inside the Pictures/Picasa folder that I made, I make a specific folder for each photo shoot, and then inside that, one folder for each camera or lens used). Picasa neatly recognizes my organizational system and displays the shoot folder as a category in the sidebar, with the folders under it.

One thing I don’t like so far is that Picasa doesn’t seem that much more efficient than iPhoto. It certainly loads faster, opening almost as soon as I launch it, while iPhoto can take up to 30 seconds to get to a usable state, and even longer to quit. However, both applications use a lot of resources on my machine, if either is running in the background my fans start going nuts before long. Picasa is, however, still only a beta, so it’s very likely that it will become better soon.

Overall, I really like Picasa, a lot more than iPhoto, and I’d recommend it to anybody who’s as fed up with iPhoto as I am.

So as some people may have heard, the first beta of Windows 7 (aka build 7000) has been leaked onto the internet. For those of you who haven’t heard, and have no idea what I’m talking about, Windows 7 is Microsoft’s next operating system (the replacement for Vista, just as Vista was the replacement for XP before it). Despite my dislike for Windows Vista, which is a bloated and unusable operating system on most machines, I decided that I ought to try out Windows 7 for myself, since Microsoft claims that it is much faster than Vista.

Well, after a bit of trouble burning it to a disk (fourth time’s the charm!), I finally got the OS up and running on my machine. Let me start of by saying that for the most part, Microsoft is completely right: 7 is amazingly fast. For the most part. Compared to Vista. The impressive thing is that the machine I’m running 7 on is somewhat old, a 2.93ghz Celeron cpu with 512mb of ram, and yet it manages to pull off full Aero effects at full speed (by which I mean it runs at the same speed as Windows XP on the same machine, give or take a bit). Admittedly, I do have a pretty good graphics card to go with the crappy processor and memory, but Vista didn’t even give me the option of enabling Aero, so this is definitely a step up. Overall my machine gets a 2.9 in the experience index (which, by the way, now goes up to 7.9 instead of 5.9) – limited by my memory.

Windows 7 is currently installed at the back of my computer, on the second partition of my secondary hard drive, which it seems to be dealing with just fine. It is completely comfortable being installed alongside Windows XP, and by default gives me the option to boot an older version of Windows or 7, which is really nice. Annoyingly, it doesn’t automatically mount the other hard drive (which is C:\\ for Windows XP), but I got it to mount as a C:\\Windows XP folder with no problems.

Even though this is only a beta, it is surprisingly stable. I don’t really think much of the stability of Windows in the first place, so the amount of instability present in 7 is practically acceptable. The most annoying thing is the Windows Explorer crash every time I log in, which is easily fixed by relaunching it. Apart from that, there have been a few minor crashes every now and then, and a few places where it’s obvious that a little polish is still needed (notably the help files).

Compatability-wise, 7 is surprisingly friendly with almost all of my hardware by default. During the system installation it managed to connect to my WiFi, and has been connected flawlessly ever since then. Seriously, two thumbs way up for Microsoft on getting the WiFi thing down. It never asks me which network to connect to, and never bugs me when it can’t connect (because it always manages to connect). Also, I love the fact that Windows 7 doesn’t bug me about empty ethernet ports like every other version of Windows does. All I have in my taskbar is the WiFi connection level and some system warnings (get a virus scanner, turn on updates, blah blah blah), both of which I could hide if I so chose. The one piece of hardware 7 seems to be having trouble with is my sound processor, which isn’t surprising as no version of Windows seems to be able to install this chip by default (the VIA Vinyl AC’97 or something).

On the software side, things in general seem to work (including Uru, which is actually faster, if anything), with the exception of the programs that rely on audio (all of which just complain about the lack of an audio device before quitting themselves – Myst, Riven, etc). I cannot get the installer for my audio chip drivers to work, which is very annoying. However, overall this seems like a very good OS in terms of compatibility.

I like the superbar a lot. It really has to be seen to fully appreciate it, but basically the superbar is the new taskbar. Applications appear now as tiles on the bar, and the quicklaunch is gone – replaced with ‘pinned’ applications, which are always present on the bar. Icons have menus that pop up when right-clicked, and if more than one window is open for an application, a small extra bar is added to the right side of the tile, one bar for each extra window. It’s a subtle way to show how many windows you have open, and much nicer than the grouping that old taskbars did.

Overall, I’m really enjoying Windows 7. Apart from the small assortment of glitches listed above, the environment is very stable and speedy, and a lot nicer looking than XP and Vista. Thanks to a patch I found online, I have Windows 7 until July, at which point there should be a newer build out anyway. I very much want to upgrade my XP installation rather than dual-boot, but the problems listed above force me not to (plus I don’t think the leaked beta even allows upgrading yet). As of this moment, I do plan on buying a copy (or at least trying to get a copy from a friend at Microsoft) of Windows 7 when it comes out. If I could, I would even install it on Eve, it’s just that good.