New software from Google: Picasa and Chrome

Google released some new software yesterday evening.

The most significant is Chrome, their browser to challenge IE and FireFox.  The other is an updated version of Picasa, the photo management program.

You can get Chrome and find out more about it here:  http://tools.google.com/chrome/?hl=en-GB

I used it for a few hours last night, and it seems pretty smooth.  It imported all my settings from IE, and just works.  The neat things I noticed are:

• you search from the URL line, so you don’t need two separate boxes.  Chrome handles this simply and transparently.  If what you’re typing looks like a URL it will call up the webpage, otherwise it will search.
  
• when you open a new tab it displays thumbnails of your commonly used webpages.
  

There are probably plenty other cool things, but it’s a browser and as such it should be unobtrusive and just work in the most intuitive way – more so than any other software.

The only problem I encountered with Chrome was that it didn’t seem to want to download Picasa.  It showed that it was trying to, but the download never seemed to progress.

So I used IE to get the latest version of Picasa – now version 3.  It, like most other Google software is classified as Beta.  The download file is a fair size larger than that of v2.7, which implies some good new stuff.

To see what that new stuff is, check here:
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=93773

Probably the most notable is the ability to retouch photos.  I only played with Picasa v3.0 for a few minutes, and I didn’t figure out how to use the Retouch tool.  Sounds promising though.  I assume it works like the Clone tool in Photoshop.

Picasa also now has an external viewer for your photos – something like the one that comes with Windows – Image Viewer – but millions of times better looking, and maybe operating.  Best of all it copes well with camera RAW files.

Overall, the general look of Picasa v3.0 is slicker, and there are a few more buttons on the screen to do stuff.

You should get Picasa v3 here:
http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa3-setup.exe