Arbitrary Musings

Unlike the latest Mac ad, my Windows hard drive is quite sparse. I’m very cognizant of what I’m installing, where it’s going, and what version it is. Suffice it to say, no new programs get on it unless I plan to use it frequently and I can trust it.

This brings me to tonight’s tale. There’s been some less-than-subtle pressuring by my girlfriend to share the photos I took during our trip to Vancouver. However, I didn’t want to do it unless I did it right. Memory card readers are everywhere now: they can be found built into computers, monitors, and sold as cheap peripherals to attach to your Win/Mac/Linux box. I suspect that there’s a smaller and smaller population of users who still persist using the importing software that comes with digital cameras. (Coincidentally, I have a lot of qualitative data confirming this that was collected during my recent site visits to watch users in their homes).

Now, I always like to remain very much in control of what’s going on with files in my computer. Historically, I’ve used a wonderful third-party file utility in Windows to copy directories of pictures from the camera’s memory card to a local drive, then use another application to do lossless JPEG rotation and viewing, and yet another program for editing/touch-ups. It was great when I was the only one looking at the pictures. But now with everyone sharing albums on the Interweb, I wanted to use a single program to import, rotate, annotate, upload, and share pictures. I had already used Picasa for simple touch-ups and resizing, but had never used it for a much more complete scenario beginning with the insertion of a card into the computer to the sharing of those photos with friends and family. Like I said at the beginning of this post, I didn’t want to install any more software on my computer. My friend Ankur had recently shared a Picasa Web Album with me; upon further research, I was happy to hear I didn’t need anything other than Picasa itself to share. With Picasa already being used for particular tasks, why not play the role of Joe User and trust that one program could do all the work?

As you can gather from the title, the experience was delightful. Besides a few minor UI qualms that irk me mainly because of my background in design and usability, the flow through the process was smooth. Dialogs had the right amount of information. Commands were where I expected them. Performance was great. And the big question: would I use it next time? Without a doubt, yes.

Wait just one moment, I hear my employer calling. “What’s that? You’re reading this as I’m writing it? And you want me to use the what? The new ‘Windows Picture and Video Import’ in Windows Vista? No thanks, I like what I’m using. And your solution has too many words. While you’re at it, why don’t you read what Paul has to say about the importing tool? No, I don’t want more ‘wow’ in my life. Okay, bye.”

Sorry about that. Let’s recap: Picasa good. Girlfriend happy. No new programs. And a new blog post out of it too!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007 at 11:57 pm and is filed under delights, hci, technology.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.