Rosie's Reviews

By Sandra Rosenweig
     
      Hot Products
      Solutions for problems you only think you have
      Most of us, when faced with our thousands of uncategorized digital photographs, yearn for a program that will organize them for us. Google's Picasa image-organizing and editing system (www.picasa.google.com) is probably the best of the breed. And it's free.
      I really like Picasa. It shows intelligent engineering and an engaging interface. It does a bunch of useful things, such as quickly searching through thousands of my photos for that one of two fashionistas holding hands on Shanghai's Nanjing Lu shopping street, for example. Before Picasa, my personal My Pictures folder contained a long list of subfolders named according to the date of the upload from the camera?2nov05, 11nov05, and ... well, you get the idea. I never could remember whether the photo of that big accident on the Nimitz Freeway was in October of 2006, or December, so it was tough to find. With Picasa, I can nest subfolders and subfolders of subfolders?e.g., /Nov06/personal/travel/Hong Kong/. But, even better, it doesn't matter what I name the folders?Picasa searches through the tags, or labels, attached to the pictures themselves. It creates a timeline for me to look at pictures by date, or by a subfolder category?yet another shortcut to finding just the right image. And it enables me to make a gift CD of images with very little effort. Now, with a recent update, Picasa 2 saves all image edits straight to disk, instead of forcing you to export them from Picasa 2 to your filing system. Plus, it's compliant with Windows Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Vista.
      There are still some rough edges though. For instance, you know the Alt-Tab key combination? If you have several windows open at once, you can use Alt-Tab to move from one to the next. But if you're in timeline mode in Picasa, which is similar to slide-show mode but different, the Alt-Tab toggle won't work. In fact, the display looks like it's reverted to early-'80s VGA for the slide-show player's controls. Weird.
      But that's not why I've uninstalled Picasa from my personal system. I uninstalled it because I never had several days to finish all the tagging and organizing. And I kept forgetting to use it. Maybe if I were an art director instead of an editor, or if I had to link every photo to its appropriate client matter, I would have persevered. But I'm not, so I don't, and I won't.
      There are lots of products like these?offering solutions to problems you only thought you had. The Logitech QuickCam Orbit MP webcam is another example (see Rosie's Ramblings, January). For several months, colleagues and I experimented with business videoconferences instead of renting a room in a central location and all of us traveling there. We teamed the webcam with Skype's voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) services and received pretty clear audio and pretty smooth video. That way, the million-mile-club member in our group could always attend the conferences, no matter where he was at the moment. I enthused about the technology in these pages. And when our group finished its project, I suggested to the members of my family in foreign climes that they get Skype accounts so we could call back and forth inexpensively. I sent each of them a webcam. We got it all set up, it worked beautifully, and then we never used it again. So, yesterday I uninstalled the Logitech webcam. (Besides, my beloved Chinese-language program conflicts with one or more of Logitech's drivers, so I was happy to end that madness too. Not Logitech's fault.) And now I'm about to uninstall Skype.
      I firmly believe that VoIP will soon meet all of our telephoning needs. I firmly believe that we will soon have only one phone number, if that's what we want, and be able to use it with all sorts of equipment. I firmly believe that one day videophones will become a normal way for us to talk to each other after, say, 9 a.m. But not yet.
      Still, I continue to use Yahoo and MSN text-messaging services, even though they invade my tranquility and privacy. I often use text messaging for work with telephone tech-support people. "Do this," she'll say, and 30 minutes later I've rebooted for the third time and am ready for instruction number 2. I also use text messaging to contact people who wouldn't be able, at that moment, to talk over a phone. And once, as I sat among a large panel of potential jurors, I sent a message on a RIM BlackBerry asking a colleague to go online and look up the judge and four lawyers in Martin Dean's Essential Courts (www. essentialpublishers.com, $248 for a year) and Martin Dean's Essential Attorneys (slightly out of date but still useful, $109 for a year). I was astonished I could get away with that.
     

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