Wednesday, June 11, 2008

How to decide software is worth testing

I'm not that happy with Google's free web album plug-in for iPhoto, so I figured I'd try a commercial alternative.

If it passed a simple test.

The test?

It had to be easy to find the uninstall directions:
iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums F.A.Q. - Products | ubermind

How can I remove this plug-in from my system?
iPhoto to Picasa Web Albums can be removed by deleting the plug-in file located at:

~/Library/Application Support/iPhoto/Plugins/
iPhotoToPicasaWebAlbums.iPhotoExporter

(~ represents your home directory.)"
Not too hard, so I'll try it out.

This is a very good screening test for all OS X software ...

Update: 6/11/08

Testing concluded, software rejected because:
  1. Licensing is by license server. So I can't backup my license, if their server goes down I can't recover it, etc. That's an immediately fatal flaw.
  2. It's very, very, very slow to browse a large collection of albums. Something is broken, scrolling was awful.
  3. It doesn't add much to Google's free uploader. In particular, there's no option to combine titles and comments to fit Picasa's single title field.

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