Cheap Tech

Google's new Wave application could change online landscape

Google unveiled its latest Web application to a group of developers, and first reactions include the words "wow," "amazing" and "unbelievable."

Despite my wife's exhortations of my geekiness, I sat through the 90 minute video of Google's demo of Wave and let my jaw strike the desk over and over again.

What is Wave? It's an extensible communications tool, sort of like a social network, e-mail and a wiki all in one.

Watch the video and let me know what you think. Will this change the Web world?

Picasa photo software will leave you smiling

There are a handful of free software programs that every person with a PC should not be without, but perhaps the one amazes me most is the Picasa photo organizer from Google.

Picasa, now in version three, is a godsend for people who shoot a lot of digital photos and need a simple way to keep track of them. My wife is a shutterbug extraordinaire (it's not uncommon for her to shoot hundreds of photos at one school event), and Picasa has helped keep me sane. I've got thousands of photos on several hard drives and Picasa keeps track of it all!

Sure, you could spend $70 for Adobe's Elements or more than $100 for ACDSee (both are very fine pieces of software), but why spend the cash when Picasa is free?

And if you're using the photo organizer that came with your camera or the one built into Windows, Picasa will blow you away with its elegance, ability and ease of use.

Picasa has dozens of features, but perhaps the most impressive is one that you don't even realize is there. When you edit a photo in Picasa, you don't actually change the image file itself. Instead, Picasa uses an .ini file to keep track of the changes and applies them when you view the image, print it or share it online.

The editing tools are exemplary for the novice shutterbug. There's even a one-click do-it-all button called "I'm feeling lucky" that does a fairly good job of color and contrast correction.

With Picasa and a Google account, you also get 1 gigabyte of online storage in Picasa Web Albums, which offers simple ways to share photos with friends and to post them on your favorite social Web sites.

 If you upload an album of photos to Picasa Web Albums and the person you're sharing them with also has Picasa, that person can download the entire album to their hard drive and import it into Picasa with one click. Try doing that with Photobucket or Flickr!

Don't get me wrong, Picasa is not Photoshop, and if you're on a Mac you'll likely be happy with iPhoto. But if you are looking for a capable, feature-rich photo organizer that just keeps getting better and better, it's tough to beat Picasa. And, it's tough to beat free!