We had reports of Picasa showing face at Macworld, and today Google has themselves announced Picasa on the official Google blog. 

Today, we’re releasing Picasa for Mac. While we’ve previously offered both a standalone Picasa Web Albums uploader and an iPhoto plugin for Mac users, Picasa for Mac finally brings all of the advanced sharing and sync features of Picasa to the millions of Mac OS X users who use Picasa Web Albums. Not to mention the “it-slices-and-dices” feature list that covers everything from color balance to collages.

Picasa for Mac looks and works much like Picasa on other platforms, and offers trademark Picasa features — such as non-destructive editing, and the ability to keep track of photos anywhere on your hard drive, then automatically account for new images as you add them.

If you’ve seen Picasa 3 for the PC, it should be just about the same on the Mac. Picasa will also have a one-way integration with iPhoto, being able to import tags and ratings along with the pictures.

Should iPhoto users switch to Picasa? We can only say that once we take a good look at that and iPhoto 09 that’s set

to release today. Before we leave it at that, I just want to comment on how out of place the UI is. Everything from the buttons to the shading doesn’t look like anything on the Macintosh. This will of course be perfect for Windows switchers looking for some familiarity.

The team will be demoing this release at Macworld, but you can download the beta yourself from Picasa.Google.com. Official screencast after the break. Continue Reading »

Initially developed by Amit Singh, MacFUSE is a plugin which allows you to extend Mac OS X’s file handling capabilities. Freshly out of Google Code, MacFUSE 2.0 brings in a whole lot of features. The update brings with it a dedicated preference pane, full 64-bit support, and several other developer-specific changes that appear to be important enough to be mentioned in their changelog. They’ve even got experimental support for Snow Leopard. 

And if you want to know what goodies await the developers hoping to exploit MacFUSE, Ars has the lowdown on that:

Many of the improvements are for developers creating file system plug-ins. In addition to support for file systems using 64-bit inodes, there are new Xcode project templates to make creating a file system even easier, and added DTrace support to make debugging easier as well. Several new callbacks for the ability to set and read file attributes, backward compatibility, and a couple small bug fixes round out the release. Detailed release notes are also available. - Ars Technica.

Now what exactly is MacFUSE? It is a plugin or architechture upon which you can build other plugins that can allow you to introduce non-native file systems to behave like part of the system. Yes, this allows to you get read/write support for NTFS and EXT3 file systems inside of OS X. Here’s another excellent implementation of MacFUSE which allows you to access iTunes from your Finder sidebar. 

There’s a guide at Download Squad that will help you set up and use MacFUSE to the fullest. Use that while we prepare our own little tutorial on using and exploiting MacFUSE. You can download and install MacFUSE from the Google Code project.

Just over 6 months after the Google Earth browser plugin was released for Windows, the 3D globe comes to both major Mac browsers; Safari and Firefox. Boldly advertising compatibility with PowerPC and Intel platforms, the Google Earth browser plugin and Javascript API let you the 3D globe directly into your web pages. 

Of course, the plugin doesn’t offer the full functionality of the full blown Google Earth application, but for those who just want the spinny wheely of the 3D globe, this plugin will do just right. 

The plugin comes in at a hefty 46MB [direct download link], which is largely due to it packing both PPC and Intel code inside a single package. Frankly I’d have preferred it if they separated the code base, considering more than two thirds are on Intel based systems. Thankfully, there’s no separate package for each browser. I didn’t notice any slowdowns in the few hours after I installed the plugin, and the performance of the maps is super smooth. For more info, a download link, and to test whether your plugin has installed, visit the Google Earth page.

Surprising news today. Google integrates the online Calendar with iCal. After what has been years of one way action between iCal and Google Calendars, Google finally supports the CalDAV protocol and brings in a tool ‘Calaboration’ for adding calendars to iCal. From the Google Mac Blog:

The Google Calendar team is proud to announce the public release of our support for the CalDAV protocol. You can now use Apple iCal with your Google Calendar, so you can work even when you’re offline, sync almost instantly, respond to invitations from others and see the free/busy data of your friends and coworkers.

I immediately downloaded the little applet “Calaboration”, which lets you add calendars to iCal. After providing your Google ID and password, it shows you a list of available calendars and you can then add them to iCal. Once added Calaboration will offer to open up iCal for you. 

Inside iCal, the calendars come under a separate section for “Google:Calendars”. I added an event and instantly I could see the spinner syncing data. Refreshing the online calendar showed that it did in fact transfer that data. The calendar will refresh every 5 minutes on its own, so if you add any events online, they will be synced right up.

This is great news for Mac users who don’t want to stray into MobileMe territory. Download the applet and give it a spin.

A lot of people complain that their Gmail box doesn’t stay in sync across their devices, and the reason behind this is that Apple Mail, unlike the iPhone, uses POP3 by default instead of IMAP. It is very easy to get fooled, as Mail automatically configures your account for you, without entering any settings other than your username and password. So how do we get it to IMAP syncing then?

First things first, enable IMAP in your Gmail preferences. To do that, open Gmail in your browser, navigate to Settings » Forwarding and POP » Enable IMAP.

Once you are done there, open Apple Mail, and get to the Preferences. In the Accounts tab, click the + button at the bottom to add a new account. 

In the following screen, add your email and password, but uncheck Automatically set up account. 

In the Incoming Mail Server screen that follows, change the Account Type to IMAP, and the incoming mail server to imap.gmail.com. Enter your full Gmail address and password. Click Next.

In the Outgoing Mail Server screen, enter smtp.gmail.com in the outgoing mail server, and enter your full email ID into the username field. 

Accept all the following screens and take your account online. Mail will then take a while to sync your emails. Now any changes your make in Mail will reflect online, on the iPhone and any other email client set up with IMAP. Once the sync is complete, go to your Preferences » Accounts and delete the POP account from there. 

Additional Tip: You will notice that IMAP with Gmail adds a bunch of folders inside a [Gmail] folder in your sidebar. Inside this folder reside your Gmail folders like Sent Mail and Labels. Here’s an easy fix to put them in their respective places in the sidebar. Select the “Sent Mail” folder inside your [Gmail] folder, and from the menubar, select MailBox » Use This Mailbox For » Sent. You can’t set sync folders for your Labels or the All Mail folder, but this should help you get things better organised.

Any more tips you can share for Gmail Mail users, do let us know.

It was just two days ago when I noticed that we were getting referrals from a certain Keyboardr.com. My curiousity got the better of me (as it always does when checking out stats) and I landed on this brilliant search site, keyboardr. 

Keyboardr is not a search engine by itself. It is basically an meta-search of Google, Google-Blogs, Google-Images, Youtube, and Wikipedia in one single page. Nothing new, we’ve seen this done before. However this is the first time I have seen something like this that actually works. Typing a search term immediately generates a result, much like spotlight does. You can then navigate the results with your keyboard and hit enter to open the link up. 

So what does this have to do with Apple? Well looking at the design and seeing how it works, I knew it had a Mac behind the scenes. So I contacted the team, and lo-and-behold, Julius Eckert replied! Who is Julius Eckert? I thought you’d never ask. He’s the same guy who made those Quicksilver user interface HUDs (Showcase and Silverflow) with slick effects based on core animation. And he made them just 3 months after he bought his first Mac in December 2007!

Keyboardr is not only created with a MacBook its also inspired by the Apple. Even IE testing has been done on the macbook (via fusion).

For the future we have big plans for keyboardr. keyboardr will utilize much more webservices. Among from usual websearch services like google, we are planning to support friendfeed, delicious, twitter, flickr, google docs and many more. And in the final stage, we will have an extension system, open for any developer, to integrate any webservice into our interface. So keyboardr will be a central station for you to get all your common internet tasks done much faster.

Any chance we will have Inquisitor like integration with the Safari browser? I sure hope so. Head over to keyboardr.com to check out this awesome search engine. If you want to have a look at Julius’s other projects, including the Quicksilver HUDs, take a look at his website.

There aren’t a lot of things out there that iPhone users wait for more anxiously than Apple’s free firmware updates. Unlike every single other company in the industry, Apple has taken it upon themselves to provide iPhone users with regular software updates that actually add valuable new features to these devices without costing them a dime (although iPod touch users do generally have to pay a price for them)!

All the iPhone and iPod touch users among our readership will be glad to know that, after a lot of leaks and rumourmongering, Apple has just made available the v2.2 firmware update for both these devices. The focus this time round has primarily been on enhancing Google Maps and adding podcasts to the “iTunes application” (that’s what Apple is calling it now because, with the addition of podcasts and the ability to download them over the cellular network, the original name ‘iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store’ would perhaps have been a misnomer). Continue Reading »

By now everyone is familiar with the Google app featuring voice recognition for the iPhone. The app was announced by Google on Friday, supposed to appear on Saturday, but when it didn’t, everyone thought Apple was playing spoil sport. Everything finally settled down when the update finally made it to the app store, voice recognition and everything. 

The problem is, while most of the reviews were raving about it, I couldn’t get it to recognize most of my search queries. Searching for “Smoking Apples” brought out a result of “clothes shopping” (and many more weird results). Then I stumbled upon this article on the Cult of Mac, which mentions that Google warns the user that the app works best with North American accents.

When you switch on Voice Search in Google’s Mobile App for iPhone, you see a little bit of warning text underneath which reads:
“Voice Search only works in English, and works best for North American English accents.”

So forget my Indian accent. The app has problems with any accent that is not an american one. Even that BBC news-reporter will have a hard time getting the voice search to work. 

I then tried some kind of an american accent and voila, “Uninstalling iPhone application” returned the exact result. There is no way that I’m going to force myself to change my accent to suit the app. Given the limited utility otherwise (there’s nothing in the app you can’t do with Safari), I’m going to have to take it off my home screen.

Before I say anything, know that these are the words that came out of this same guy’s mouth, “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.” Moving on…

Microsoft’s CEO Steve Balmer dismisses the Android platform as financially unsound and doomed to be a failure for Google, reports Suzanne Tindal for Cnet News. 

Speaking at Telstra’s annual investment day, Ballmer said designing Android wasn’t easy for Google. “They can hire smart guys, hire a lot of people, blah dee blah dee blah, but you know they start out way behind, in a certain sense,” says Balmer. 

He questioned Google’s ability to make money with Android. “I don’t really understand their strategy. Maybe somebody else does. If I went to my shareholder meeting, my analyst meeting, and said, ‘hey, we’ve just launched a new product that has no revenue model!’…I’m not sure that my investors would take that very well. But that’s kind of what Google’s telling their investors about Android,” he said.

Personally, I don’t think the Android platform is going to take off in the way the iPhone has, but if Balmer thinks it sucks, then I must reconsider my views.

And just so that you wake up to an awesome friday morning, here’s an awesome video of Balmer doing the monkey dance! Continue Reading »

It seems that by the time Google announce the Mac version of Chrome, half the metal names in the periodic table should be taken. We’ve already had “CrossOver Chromium” and now Mesa Dynamics have given us a Chrome inspired, Safari based browser—Stainless.

Multi-process Browser: Initial Impressions

This was one of the innovative Chrome features that excited me. Crashed pages can’t bring down the browser or other tabs. Each tab in Stainless runs independently in a separate process, so you get increased performance and stability.

For each tab you load, Stainless starts a new process “StainlessClient”. Each of these processes take up about 18 MB of RAM. So if you open 5 tabs, then the total memory usage is around 100 MB including that of the app itself. Testing Safari and Firefox (with five tabs) took less than 90 MB of memory. Nevertheless this is good as the memory for that tab is immediately freed to the system when you close it. Also, if a page loads slowly (due to flash or embedded items), it doesn’t affect the performance of the other tabs.

Other Chrome inspired features include tabs above address bar (which some might say is bad interface design), tabs that can be dragged between windows (clumsy and isn’t smooth as in Safari), a unified address and search bar, and porn private browsing mode. Unlike Safari however, in Stainless, Private Browsing windows operate separate from the rest of the browser. So you may do your regular surfing, while having a private window or tab (coloured red) which does not record your moves. One weird thing I noticed is, it automatically signed in to some sites without having to enter my UserID and password. How can it access to my Keychain without my consent?

The developers warn it’s a “technology demo” (eh?) and will continue to stay that way for some time. You really can’t use this as your default browser for there are a lot of things which need work—a download manager, bookmarks, page search, view source, clumsy tabs handling, etc. In fact if you look into the Preferences, you can only enter your home page URL and specify the search engine.

Still Stainless performs better than CrossOver Chromium. Download the 0.1 version (just 800 KB!) and have a go at “Multi Process Architecture” if only see what the fuss is about.