Posted by Jason Cook, Product Marketing Manager
When we released our initial public beta of Picasa for Mac OS X at Macworld, we mentioned that early testers were likely to spot some rough edges on the beta. Since then, we’ve been (metaphorically) filing and sanding away — with our latest beta build, out Monday, we’ve now fixed over 200 outstanding issues since our first Mac beta release.
While our immediate attention has been focused on squashing crashers and other obnoxious bugs, we’re also trying to make sure that the refinements Mac users have asked us for are addressed, as well. For example, proper color profiles are now present in our latest build, which allow you to view your photographs with any embedded color information added to the photo — giving you more accuracy as you edit and fine-tune your images, so you can show off your snapshots at their very best. In addition, a few of the features that were deactivated in our earliest beta builds, like 3rd-party prints and exporting as HTML, are now available, and a few minor UI niggles like text-spacing are fixed as well.
On the PC side, Picasa 3’s beta lasted for about 2 months. Our Mac beta period is going to last a bit longer than that as we bring it to parity with its more-established PC counterpart — but we encourage you to give it a spin now, especially if you’re a Picasa Web Albums user wanting to sample advanced features like automatic sync between your PC and the web, or Picasa’s integrated upload & sharing features.
As always, let us know what you think — the team is actively monitoring Mac beta feedback in our user help forum.
