WHAT'S NEW?
Free Google Software Kicks Aps
When someone buys something for $1.8 billion and then gives it to you free, there
are only two logical questions: (1) What’s the catch? and (2) Where can I get
it? We got it. We’re loving it. And we’re still trying to find the downside. We
are getting paid absolutely nothing to suggest that you try this one for yourself.
VISIT: Picasa web site
I thought I was too old for new software. I write in Word 97 which is the software
equivalent of an IBM Selectric. For readers under 20, the Selectric was a typewriter,
which was like a computer with no screen or memory.
Last year Google purchased Piscasa, a software that sorts, sends and enhances
digital photographs. It used to cost $30 until Google bought the California company
and beefed up the program. Now it’s better, much better, and free.
Until yesterday I was using the photo software that came with my 10-year old
digital camera. It was slow and simple and I knew how to use it. Picasa 2 is about
20 times better and takes about 20 minutes to learn. Picasa can find all of the
pictures on your hard-drive, even if you cannot. It sorts them into folders and
provides an awesome set of tools for manipulating them.
My hard-drive contains at least 5,000 of my own digital photos and thousands
of other scanned images. Picasa scooped them right up and laid them into crisp
thumbnails without affecting the files themselves.
You can add a blue sky to a gray day or make new pix look like old daguerreotypes
in seconds. You can scroll through ALL the images at once without clicking from
folder to folder. You can search for images, add captions, give them titles and
key words. You can zoom in or out. You can straighten out crooked photos, sharpen
fuzzy ones (within reason), remove red-eye, beef up flesh tones, crop, make collages
or turn small pictures into giant posters.
That should be plenty, but this is just the runway. Google is intent on hooking
us into an array of freeware. You can use their email (Gmail) with a huge free
mailbox. You can send images to friends through text messaging or build your own
blog site. Picasa is just one Lego in a giant software construction in a future
Google universe. Their superb search engine was apparently just the tip of the
iceberg.
While technology writers seem universally to praise Picasa, there is a nagging
fear that this gift horse has something hidden inside. Google asserts that they
cannot see what’s going on inside your hard drive. Maine writer Robert Oakley, like many of us, wonders aloud whether Google has some insidious endgame in
mind. While praising Picasa 2 he recalls the joke about the scientists who programmed
a huge computer to calculate whether or not there is really a God. The computer
had insufficient data, so they kept feeding it more info. Finally the supercomputer
had enough data to answer the question – Does God exist? "He does now," the computer
replied.
Other pundits suggest that Google is on a quest to overthrow the current computer
deity Bill Gates, recently knighted by Queen Elizabeth. Those of us who are fearful
of Bill and love Google wonder how we poor mortals will fare when the titans tuseel.
No matter who wins when gods battle, in Greek mythology anyway, the humans get
hurt.
Back in the late 1980s I bought a computer slide-making software for $3,000.
It was the latest thing. My company was going to make millions off it. Then Microsoft
released Powerpoint for a few hundred bucks and the bottom fell out of the slide-making
business. Google seems intent on doing to Microsoft what Microsoft has done to
almost everyone else. For now, with only the slightest hesitation, I wish them
luck. You too should consider rolling that gift horse past your firewall and into
your computer. If we’re all going to be assimilated anyway, it should at least
be free and fun.
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