Dan Kegel wrote: > Google has indeed been working on Picasa, and it's finally available for > download at > http://labs.google.com/ I tried this, and the link to the linux version apparently does not exist!
David > > For the curious, here are a few tidbits about how it came to be. > > When Google wanted to port Picasa to Linux, they faced a > problem: the Picasa team was busy working on new projects, and > having them also do a native port would have taken a while. > As an experiment, Google decided to give Wine a try. > A quick look showed that much of Picasa already worked, > but key features were missing: the IWebBrowser API, SSL, > scanner/camera support, removable media notification (so you can > insert a flash drive and have Windows notice it right away), > and change notification (so Windows can notify apps when new > files are created), among others. Fortunately, Wine was > already halfway to having an implementation of IWebBrowser > thanks to Jacek Caban's Summer of Code 2005 project. And all > that other stuff couldn't be *that* hard, right? :-) So > Google engaged Codeweavers to add those features and fix any > other bugs. This resulted in tons of improvements to Wine (see > the list at code.google.com/wine.html), all of which are now in > the public tree at winehq.org. > > Many people assume that when porting a Windows app to Linux > using Wine, the best thing to do is link Winelib into the > application to create a native Linux application. Not so! > It's just as effective, and a heck of a lot easier, to run > the same binary on both Windows and Wine. So that's what the > Picasa team did. Picasa for Linux uses slightly different > text messages, but the .exe file is identical for both Windows > and Linux. > > Toward the very end, everything was looking great except > that the initial assumption that most cameras emulate storage > devices turned out to be wrong. Fortunately, Marcus Meissner > just happened to decide to implement libgphoto support; his > patch appeared at the perfect moment, and now Picasa supports > both common flavors of cameras. > > Two features left out of the Linux version were CD-ROM > burning (the driver Picasa uses is hard to support under Wine) > and movie playback (Wine doesn't have the necessary codecs). > Both are potentially fixable in a future version, but were > beyond the scope of this first port. > > One interesting challenge when shipping commercial apps for > Linux is packaging -- do you choose RPM or Debian packages, > or do you use a WIndows-style installer? The Picasa for > Linux team chose all three, in hopes of pleasing everybody. > (Let's see how well *that* works :-) The Windows-style > installer was implemented using the open-source Loki installer, > and a few patches were contributed back for that, too. > > The Picasa for Linux team had a blast. It's not often you > get to pour resources into a vital open source project to help > ship a commercial application! We hope we get to do it again > sometime soon, and we hope the results are good enough to > encourage other companies to give Wine a try. > > Thanks to the Wine community for a very capable platform! > - Dan
