New Google Apps For Linux Coming

techoon writes "The goal of the Google Linux Client Team is to develop Linux desktop applications, such as the official Linux versions of Google Earth and Google Picasa. This team made an interesting splash during a presentation at the first-ever Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, which they had kindly hosted at their Mountain View campus. The Google presenters claimed some 'significant accomplishments' and other new Google desktop applications coming out this year for the Linux platform."

Native?

As TFA says, Picasa for Linux wasn't native, just a Windows version repackaged with Wine. I hope the new stuff isn't like that.

Re:Native?

should they be writing picasa fom scratch? the wine versions help the wine project by submitting patches bringing more win32 apps usable to linux making linux a more and more appealing option.

Re:Crumbs from the table aren't appealling

An interface is slow when it commonly requires chains of arcane data structures as parameters, and many Win32 API calls do just that. An interface is buggy when there are 17 ways to do something, each producing a slightly different result. Windows API developed both of these traits over the years, and I only pity Microsoft for that, not blame them. But here they are, with a junk Win32 API and with a newer .NET layer built on top of that.

I'm aware of the shortcomings of the Win32 api, as I used to code with it extensively in the '90s when I actually programmed for the Windows platform, but I don't really understand your point. Passing in pointers to parameters, no matter how "arcane", isn't slow, nor is dereferencing them to get the values you need. Pretty much anything passed by value are just integers, like window handles and stuff. Or maybe you mean "slow" as in time-consuming to code, in which case I suppose I agree. As for the second complaint, do you have an example of this 17 different ways to do something, all with slightly different results? That would be cool to see.

Re:Crumbs from the table aren't appealling

I was specifically mentioning pointers to large, complex data structures that often contain pointers to other, even more complex data structures. You can find those everywhere, for example look for LPSECURITY_ATTRIBUTES and follow the pointers and the methods [microsoft.com] that manipulate them. It's a lot of work to code it all correctly, and it's a lot of time to run it. If you code WDM drivers then such structures are everywhere, even to convert one ASCII string into one UNICODE string. You can see some code [microsoft.com] here.

With regard to 17 ways to do something, it's easy. Look at ReadFile vs. ReadFileEx, OpenFile vs. CreateFile vs. CreateFileTransacted - they are all generally doing the same thing. This was caused by freezing the API at various points in time, and when it was discovered that this and that function can't be implemented in existing API then a new method was concocted, with just the parameters for that new function, and so on.

But there are even more fundamental differences, when the whole API gets deprecated. For example, the Waveform API - you still can use it, but it's not nice and does not always offer you the best results. DirectX / DirectSound is more appropriate these days, though XAudio2 is also interesting, though you'd better know about X3DAudio if you are making games, though DirectSound3D could replace it for you. Fortunately, on Vista there is WASAPI in between the stack and the hardware, which only adds fun to the scope of your testing :-)

Re:Native?

This misses the point of Wine. Wine is for running applications that CANNOT be ported, e.g. commercial software like MS Office. Applications that can be ported, should. Otherwise, they pack their own version of Wine, and it can conflict with a version of Wine a user already has installed.

A native Linux version of Picasa doesn't seem preposterous to me. Google's done it with Google Earth.

Using hacks like Wine (a great hack, but still a hack) to run applications on Linux makes it less appealing to me than running native software.

Re:Native?

This misses the point of Wine. Wine is for running applications that CANNOT be ported, e.g. commercial software like MS Office. Applications that can be ported, should.

I agree. However, if we are talking about porting by rewriting significant parts of the code, then why not do this the right way? I mean, rewrite it in a portable framework (Java, .Net/Mono, Python) using portable libraries (GTK, Qt). Then instead of porting to Linux you now have a single code base to improve upon for all of your platforms.

In fact, Google should spearhead this sort of thing by supporting (if only in the form of patches) cross-platform toolkits like Python, GTK, etc. Google's web services (search, docs&spreadsheets, etc.) are powerful in part because they are cross-platform; Google applications should be the same. To do so is in Google's self-interest.

"Some projects will be open source"

Why not all? (And why no hyphen either?)

Funny enough, I just installed googleearth...

Any idea if a .deb file for googleearth 4.2 will be available? I'm interested in playing with google sky. :-)

blinded by ads

I looked, saw 99% ads and 1% article and left the page- someone actually feel like wading through that?

"What could this be? Google Desktop for Linux?"

Ooo..I'm really looking forward to them porting that one [google.com]

TFA is spam??

What the heck? I clicked on the link to TFA. It sent me to a page at techrythm.com, where there is an extremely short article, giving hardly any more information than the slashdot summary. In it are a lot of links double-underlined in green. When I move my mouse over the links, I get an ad floating around. When I click on a link, I go to some lame spam page that doesn't seem to have anything to do with what the link claims it is.

Re:TFA is spam??

Sorry about the reply-to-self, but considering how incredibly annoying and misleading these adbrite ads are, I thought some slashdotters might be interested to know that adding http://*.adbrite.com/* to your adblock patterns seems to get rid of them completely -- the spam links don't even show up with the double underlining, which I imagine is because they're being inserted dynamically by a JS script served up from an adbrite server.

Give us gtalk on linux already!

Gtalk with all the features available that the windows version has, such as chat logging and voicemail support. If there was ever going to be a killer app this would be it.

I hope so

Linux is still a second-class citizen in the eyes of many vendors that claim to support it. Google apps, Novell apps, drivers, HP/Lenovo programs, etc. It's about time things start to catch up.

Keep them coming and think "simultaneous releases" !!

-m

What about other Unices?

While this is good news, better news would be Google developing apps for Unix in general, and not Linux specifically.

64 bit Google Earth

a 64 bit version of Google Earth would be awesome!

Whats brewing?

Perhaps some glinux will be coming out. Simple to use/setup, powerful, and wont have the hardware problems and glitchyness of standard linux distros. (I've used Ubuntu for 6 months as a developer.. and its not quite there yet)

They meant Google Desktop

The guys who put on those slides were talking
about Google Desktop, but couldn't mention it by
name yet.

Sketchup!

I would love to see Sketchup ported over. It sure don't run on Wine, least as far as I have tried. My fingers are crossed.

GTALK.gtalk.

Google Talk, Gtalk , gtalk . gtalk gtalkgtalkgtalk....Goggletalk

Trinkets?

How about an Exchange killer? How about making gmailfs "real"? How about ANYTHING other than Google Earth and Picassa? You know, for people who use their computers, for something other than MySpace.

Here is what irritates the hell out of me...

I go to this blog with Firefox, and it looks like crap. Then I notice that it says it is best viewed in Opera. A little ironic isn't it?

Re:Shitty Linux font rendering

No this is not

Shitty Linux font rendering

the font rendering is excellent if you look at the original pdf of the presentation:

https://www.linux-foundation.org/images/6/6e/Dam4_ google.pdf [linux-foundation.org]

The shitty looking fonts on the web page are due to poor scaling of the original images that are linked from Phoronix:

http://www.phoronix.net/image.php?id=751&image=goo gle_new_preview [phoronix.net]

where the fonts still look good.

Re:sure seems like

I was thinking the same thing. I've happily removed Google Earth and Picasa. I just don't find either application particularly interesting.

Misread

Damn, the mis-read was soo much better:

Will it be PORN powered?

Re:Googel?

Nope.

OTOH, would it really bother you if you were?