Picasa for Linux available!

It’s not news at this point that the long awaited Picasa for Linux is going to be a hit. Still, the apparent story behind its inception is pretty interesting.

Google has indeed been working on Picasa, and it’s finally available for
download at labs.google.com.

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), all of which are now in
the public tree at winehq.org. Source: winehq.com

[tags]picasa,ssl,iwebbrowser api[/tags]