Moving on from Picasa • Hacker News Board

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#171

Post by Spooky23 » Sat, Feb 13, 2016, 12:55 AM UTC

at-fates-hands wrote: post #74

al_biglan wrote: post #12

Huge pet peeve of Google... Develop a great little application/product that pulls you in and develops a decent user base only to have it disappear. I get that in a normal company, the finances might in fact dictate that the company can no longer support the user base with the revenue collected. With Google.. these free services seem to disappear with little warning. (to be fair: 4 years of not updating the official B…

I rarely put much stock in Google products. Their approach seems to be to get a decent idea off the ground, then turn it over to the masses to use and figure out and suggest how they can make it better. This usually means no support whatsoever. While I can appreciate the whole, "Post something in our forum!" approach to customer service, I can't tell you how many times I've posted a question about a product or a bug…

One of my coworkers pursued a bug where Chrome would not update version numbers in WMI like 5 years ago... Fixed like a month ago.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#172

Post by wstrange » Sat, Feb 13, 2016, 12:56 AM UTC

nattaylor wrote: post #41

I was a Picasa user for several years and I really liked it, but after Google Photos was announced and I saw the handwriting on the wall and completely switched (with much consternation) to Google Photos and have had a great experience. I uploaded over 17,000 to the Google-free tier and applaud all the automation they have built around auto-panorama-stitching, auto-animations, auto-face-tagging, auto-object, and auto…

A big +1

Having an "AI" organize, edit and tag my photos frees up a lot of time. Part of the transition is learning to let go of the way I used to manage photos.

I still want the right to take all my stuff with me - but I think Google has done a reasonable job of ensuring that happens.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#173

Post by Arkaad » Sat, Feb 13, 2016, 12:56 AM UTC

sigjuice wrote: post #44

masklinn wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's at least two of us then. Reader is what made me swear never to rely on a Google service for anything ever again.

I still don't know how to use the Internet without Google Reader :/

What about The Old Reader? https://theoldreader.com/ It's very similar to Google Reader, with the same UI.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#174

Post by manaskarekar » Sat, Feb 13, 2016, 12:58 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #150

dingdingdang wrote: post #131

Ah, the fun (irony here). Before user-end computing can regain a semblance of sensibility we will need to move towards guaranteed secure sandbox environments for apps that allow historical re-use of earlier versions. What is happening at the moment is that IMMENSE quantities of skill development and time is continually flushed away everytime Google/Microsoft/Take-your-pick-software-company decides to retire or dramat…

That's what Free Software was supposed to protect users from.

Relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/743/

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#175

Post by cname » Sat, Feb 13, 2016, 1:04 AM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #141

xd1936 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being able to sort pics Google Photos is amazing, but sorting photos in it is pretty lackluster. You can make albums... That's about it. It's sort of like Gmail; They want you to worry less about your complex organization system, and just use their fantastic search instead.

> fantastic search Which is beaten by even PostgreSQL’s fulltext search in 'simple' mode. (At least for my mails). Hilariously bad.

Really? I've never not been able to find an email I was looking for in Gmail.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#176

Post by tuananh » Sat, Feb 13, 2016, 1:11 AM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #141

xd1936 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Being able to sort pics Google Photos is amazing, but sorting photos in it is pretty lackluster. You can make albums... That's about it. It's sort of like Gmail; They want you to worry less about your complex organization system, and just use their fantastic search instead.

> fantastic search Which is beaten by even PostgreSQL’s fulltext search in 'simple' mode. (At least for my mails). Hilariously bad.

any ref for that?

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#177

Post by akkartik » Sat, Feb 13, 2016, 1:22 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #150

dingdingdang wrote: post #131

Ah, the fun (irony here). Before user-end computing can regain a semblance of sensibility we will need to move towards guaranteed secure sandbox environments for apps that allow historical re-use of earlier versions. What is happening at the moment is that IMMENSE quantities of skill development and time is continually flushed away everytime Google/Microsoft/Take-your-pick-software-company decides to retire or dramat…

That's what Free Software was supposed to protect users from.

Not really. Notice that grandparent said "the situation is even wilder in the closed gardens". It still exists in open source. Rolling back a set of packages to some older state isn't a trivial operation, and rewrites are incredibly expensive no matter who's doing them.

Open source is a prerequisite, but this isn't a solved technical problem. The challenge is to make codebases rewrite friendly. The bottleneck isn't the rewrite itself, it's all the risk due to the regressions that rewrites tend to cause, and all the stress from trying to catch these regressions before a release. I've been working on ways to express more tests than our current (c 1970) unix stack can support. The goal: to be able to certify a release to production just by running its automated tests. No large projects today meet this standard. Once we do I think we'll be in much better shape to undertake dramatic rewrites, and to reuse code between projects/rewrites.

(More info on my project: https://github.com/akkartik/mu)

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#178

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Feb 13, 2016, 1:40 AM UTC

at-fates-hands wrote: post #74

al_biglan wrote: post #12

Huge pet peeve of Google... Develop a great little application/product that pulls you in and develops a decent user base only to have it disappear. I get that in a normal company, the finances might in fact dictate that the company can no longer support the user base with the revenue collected. With Google.. these free services seem to disappear with little warning. (to be fair: 4 years of not updating the official B…

I rarely put much stock in Google products. Their approach seems to be to get a decent idea off the ground, then turn it over to the masses to use and figure out and suggest how they can make it better. This usually means no support whatsoever. While I can appreciate the whole, "Post something in our forum!" approach to customer service, I can't tell you how many times I've posted a question about a product or a bug…

[deleted]

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#179

Post by degio » Sat, Feb 13, 2016, 2:00 AM UTC

CaptSpify wrote: post #140

jbob2000 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's kind of Google's modus operandi though, isn't it? They don't make desktop apps unless there is a distinct need for it (Google Earth, for example). They are all about the web!

I think that's the complaint though: Why take a perfectly fine working desktop application, move it to the web, then remove the desktop side? Presumably, if I wanted the web version, I would have started with the web version.

by the way, I can find a million alternative cloud based photo services, all with comparable features. On the other hand, there are very few desktop picture managers, especially on windows and linux.

Re: Moving on from Picasa

#180

Post by fencepost » Sat, Feb 13, 2016, 2:20 AM UTC

al_biglan wrote: post #12

Huge pet peeve of Google... Develop a great little application/product that pulls you in and develops a decent user base only to have it disappear. I get that in a normal company, the finances might in fact dictate that the company can no longer support the user base with the revenue collected. With Google.. these free services seem to disappear with little warning. (to be fair: 4 years of not updating the official B…

My expectation of Google Voice going away has kept me from doing more with it or many other Google products; what's funny is that by showing even token effort they could easily turn me into a $5-10/month paying customer instead of one who actively avoids depending on anything Google.

As it is I'll keep paying my money to my lightly used long term online fax service and perhaps at some point I'll switch over to a paid SIP provider.

As for GOOG-411 isn't it pretty widely accepted that it was free to build up a large pool of voice data without the privacy concerns of using Google Voice customer voicemail? Its end was guaranteed once they had enough training data for minimum viable voice recognition - on the same kind of phone microphones even.