Thursday 28 December 2006

Google Picasa on Mac OS X


On my intel-based mac, I have been experimenting with running various Windows programs directly (without the use of a virtual machine such as Parallels Desktop, Qemu, or VMware) via the Windows emulation library WINE. This is a project traditionally stemming from the need to run certain Windows applications such as MS Office on platforms like GNU/Linux. Now there is a commercial version available for the mac, which seems to run a huge number of programs quite nicely on OS X.

There is a free beta available currently here
www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac

I managed to install several pieces of software on my intel mac, including WinUHA, Microsoft Project, Microsoft Office, and Google's photo management software Picasa. Picasa looks particularly slick out of the bunch actually.


There is one odd thing when I run Picasa using Crossover - it finds my mac desktop and puts it up as a special heading "My Mac Desktop". This suggests to me that Google are already using the WINE library to port various bits of software including Picasa, and that Picasa specially recognises the mac desktop, either by the presence of certain hidden files, or perhaps by the relatively unique paths used by OS X systems (e.g. the /Users directory instead of /home).


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