Picasa, iPhoto, software and life

Screenshot of Picasa 2

I was afraid to install new software on my computer. It's not the spyware problem, nor was it because I've ran out of storage space. Windows has this nasty habbit of slowing down more with every additional software you installed, especially if those software come from adobe or has anything to do with creating photos and videos.

Picasa was a pleasant exception.

Google acquired Picasa a little over six months back, in an effort to provide better tools for their blogging service that they bought prior, blogspot.com. Picasa does everything photo: cropping, resizing, color correction, brightness, all that jazz. It's nothing special, except for the way it runs.

Or should I say, the way it runs so well.

15 minutes into using picasa 2, I was strike with a strange sense of deja vu. It works just like iPhoto for the Macs. It's like someone in the picasa theme collected all the things iPhoto did right, transfer it to windows and give it a XP look and feel.

First things first, the one thing I like most about Picasa: Interface design. Cropping, resizing and all those things you do often are 1-2 clicks away, instead of burried in dropdown menus. This is exactly the same UI design philosophy for Mac OS applications. Common features should be accessable so much so that even if you have a one-button mouse, you can still do your work.

Google and Apple, both incredibly popular brands, are matching towards the same destination of life software. Let's take a look at google's lineup of new products: Google Map, Gmail (Mail / .Mac), Blogspot, Picasa (iPhoto), Google Desktop Search (spotlight), SMS Service. All these software directly relates to your everyday life. Apple's software team even spell it out for you: iLife, they're not selling you the software, they're selling the experience after using their software. It matter not how incredibly efficient your algorithm is, or how interpolatble your codes are. It's how good the end user feels using the software to finish what they need to do.

That, my friend, is software engineering for life.