"Great Minds think Alike"?
It's amazing how the Web allows people who share a view to get in touch with one another in a short timeframe (aka synergy). For instance, as soon as I wrote my article on Google's infamous "Picasa for Linux" snafu (disclaimer: I generally like Google!, I use almost all of their web services), I received a note from Hubert Figuière a.k.a. "Crazy French", who's also active in the Gnome community, it read:
"I like your Google Picasa article. I myself did post something like that last week, and I got flamed for doing. Nice to see that I'm not the only to think that Google did a bad job."
I specially like one of the comments on his blog:
"it is not a native program. It is just a packaging trick. Here is what
dpkg -L picasa shows:
/opt/picasa/wine/drive_c/Program Files/Picasa2/Picasa2.exe.
Obviously you have been fooled. It all just run under Wine like a native Windows application. Wine does not run on PowerPC, for obvious technical reasons."
Then I received another comment:
Fernando,
I think Googlites have made fools of themselves with this Picasa for penguins release. The one thing that may be good is that the WINE project stands to benefit a lot from this ; however, a native application (using either GTK+ or wxWindows, like ... Xara LX (xaraxtreme.org)) would have been a lot better... LX is a good example of a cross platform application that works perfectly. I met the Xara team at LGM (libregraphicsmeeting.org) 2006 in Lyon, France. They took the wxWindows route because, well, it was the easiest, fastest way to port (I bet using WINE never crossed their minds...). 2 years ago they were all Linux-unaware. Google has been using Linux for as long as it exists, and yet... Oh well.
Greets, Francois
Not only that, by googling on "Picasa Linux Wine" I landed this morning into this great article on the web site of Australian magazine APC:
Picasa for Linux begs a few questions
http://www.apcstart.com/site/admin/2006/05/168/picasa-for-linux-begs-a-few-questions
So... someone was thinking about the same thing and writing an article about at the same time I was writing mine!!. I call this "collective mind reading!". :-)
I swear to God I had never read it before this morning -and I didn't even know about that Australian magazine, either!. Thank God one of my screenshots I took while writing the article shows the May 28 date, and most of the rest show May 29. That proves that *I* started working on my article earlier than the Aussies!. :-D.
What's that common phrase they say... "great minds think alike"?. ;-)
