“Remember Picasa? There is no native application that still comes close to it’s feature parity. But sadly it was discontinued in favour of a cloud application: Google Photos. What happened with Picasa also happened to millions of other applications around the same time Picasa was discontinued. The applications we use to run on our PC have moved to cloud.”
Why You Should Start Self Hosting | Rohan Deshmukh (rohanrd.xyz)
I loved Picasa. It was beautiful, ran super smoothly and was very useful. Yes, the pictures were on my local drives but they could have been online as well.
What mattered was that the software I was using to edit my pictures was a native app.
I think the fact that apps have moved to the cloud is detrimental mainly because we have *so* much computational power locally. Having things online is not bad per se . But software –the processing and editing part of interaction- needs to be local, forever.
In 2006 Picasa would run perfectly on a single core Pentium M. Today we have so much more computational power in a basic computer that I don’t even want to do the math. It’s probably five or eight orders of magnitude more, if not way more. Phones have 8 CPU cores now! I mean. Gross.
And we use that power to spin browsers to do and re-do and re-re-do what native apps did better. It’s absolutely ludicrous. It was in 2012, it still is the case in 2022 and even more obvious: I have a 2004 Win32 native RSS feed reader that updates and displays feeds far faster than anything I’ve ever seen.
There’s something wrong when 15-year-old tech is better in pretty much every way.
We need native, solid and full-featured apps more than ever. I’m begging you, programmers. We want to consume less electricity and use our computers as best as we can while enjoying some privacy? We need those mid-2000s software/apps with once-a-year update if any, back. Right now.