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New Google Apps For Linux Coming

Posted by kdawson on Sun Sep 02, 2007 08:32 PM
from the bated-breath dept.
Software Businesses Google The Internet Linux
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."
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Firehose:New Google Linux Apps Coming Soon !! by techoon (1150597)
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  • Native? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by colourmyeyes (1028804) on Sunday September 02 2007, @08:38PM (#20446925) Homepage
    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? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by yincrash (854885) on Sunday September 02 2007, @08:42PM (#20446957)
      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:Native? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by colourmyeyes (1028804) on Sunday September 02 2007, @08:56PM (#20447055) Homepage
        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? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by kripkenstein (913150) on Monday September 03 2007, @07:05AM (#20450321)

          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.

        • Otherwise, they pack their own version of Wine, and it can conflict with a version of Wine a user already has installed.

          Only if they have done a really stupid job of it.

          I currently have at least three versions of Wine installed: Cedega, the latest Wine from WineHQ, and an older Wine for an older app that doesn't work with the newer ones.

          All you need to do is set some environment variables: Where to look for the other Wine executables, and where to look for the Wine home directory (~/.wine). Not easy for

      • Indeed. (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dkegel (904729)
        Yes, the work done on IExplore for Picasa benefitted all apps that use embedded browsers. Wine's quality is far higher now than it was back when Corel tried it with Word Perfect; it's reasonable to expect a Wine app to run smoothly and without crashes these days -- if, that is, the vendor is willing to do a little QA and get a few Wine bugs fixed, like Google was. More companies should use Wine to port their apps to Linux, at least to get a toe in the water. If sales take off, they can dive in and do the

          • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

            by tftp (111690)
            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.

            • Re:Crumbs from the table aren't appealling (Score:4, Interesting)

              by abigor (540274) on Sunday September 02 2007, @10:07PM (#20447487)

              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 (Score:4, Interesting)

                by tftp (111690) on Sunday September 02 2007, @10:33PM (#20447639) Homepage
                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 :-)

    • Part of the problem is, native for which Linux? There are multiple OSes based on the Linux kernel, and they vary wildly, as to which hardware they run on and what underlying libraries and APIs they incorporate.

      If Google wants to do it right, they need to release a cross-platform source tarball, and nothing less. A binary glob that only runs in version xx.xx of 'distro' xyzzy won't cut it.

      Part of why I say this is that I run NetBSD, and said source tarball would be rolled into pkgsrc quickly, too. A binar
  • Why not all? (And why no hyphen either?)
  • Any idea if a .deb file for googleearth 4.2 will be available? I'm interested in playing with google sky. :-)

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by ForumTroll (900233)
      googleearth-package is in the Debian repository and will help to quickly create the deb file for google earth. Just apt-get install googleearth-package and then run make-googleearth-package.

  • "What could this be? Google Desktop for Linux?" (Score:3, Funny)

    by footissimo (869107) on Sunday September 02 2007, @08:53PM (#20447031)
    Ooo..I'm really looking forward to them porting that one [google.com]

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by rtb61 (674572)
        Google only really makes minimal commitments to open source, really only sufficient for marketing purposes or to save itself money on licence fees. The only times you want to get into producing your own Linux distribution, is when you want to get into the service and support market upon a national or international basis (demonstrates expertise), you have a sufficient number of desktops to warrant your own corporate/government distribution (tens of thousands), high performance - high security - high stabilit

  • TFA is spam?? (Score:5, Informative)

    by bcrowell (177657) on Sunday September 02 2007, @09:00PM (#20447081) Homepage
    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: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's a metaphor for how Google will make money from Linux users.

    • Re:TFA is spam?? (Score:5, Informative)

      by bcrowell (177657) on Sunday September 02 2007, @11:14PM (#20447887) Homepage
      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! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LingNoi (1066278) on Sunday September 02 2007, @09:07PM (#20447113)
    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 (Score:3, Interesting)

    by invisik (227250) on Sunday September 02 2007, @09:12PM (#20447149) Homepage
    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

  • 64 bit Google Earth (Score:4, Interesting)

    by phrostie (121428) on Sunday September 02 2007, @09:17PM (#20447189)
    a 64 bit version of Google Earth would be awesome!

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