kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Picasa for OS X in 2008

It’s been a busy week this week, and there’s some news items that I just didn’t get to yet.  This one comes to us courtesey of TechCrunch.

One of the most popular photo editing programs for Windows has to be Google’s Picasa.  Though it’s not the most full-featured image editing on the market it’s free and great for managing photos and albums, something that isn’t a strength of more full-featured applications like Photoshop and Paint.NET.

On the Mac, the most obvious photo organizer is Apple’s own iPhoto.  iPhoto does a decent job of organizing photos, though it does have its drawbacks and it’s not free.

A free Picasa would not only challenge iPhoto, but would also channel users into using Google’s online service Picasa Web Albums.  One question raised is how this will affect competing photo management services like Photobucket and industry leader Flickr.  Reality is it will probably do little to the market since OS X users make up a relatively small percentage of the software market, but what it will do is make Picasa a true cross-platform tool.

Ultimate Google Analytics Plugin for WordPress

I’ve always been a bit of a stats monkey when it comes to… well pretty much everything.  I like to know how many there are, how long it takes, how much it costs.  I want the numbers.  But more than that, I want accurate numbers and often times in the past trying to get accurate numbers for website traffic has been a real challenge.  Google Analytics does a great job of  tracking every hit to my blog, but unfortunately it tracks mine too.  This conundrum led me to the Ultimate Google Analytics Plugin.

This plugin does a great number of things and has an options screen as long as my arm.  Aside from having the ability to ignore administrators, it also has the ability to add in tracking to all of your outgoing links and downloads.

If you use WordPress and you use Google Analytics you need this plugin.