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For a while now, I’ve been in search of an easy way to browse my Picasaweb albums on the big screen television in my living room. Little did I know that the answer was right under my nose… or under my television, to be more precise!

First some background: I organize all the photographs I take using Google’s Picasa for Windows. And then I upload them to Picasa’s online photo sharing service called Picasa Web Albums (aka Picasaweb). I upload most of my albums with Picasa’s “Anyone with the link” sharing option.

So I’ve had a Roku box for, oh, maybe a year now? When they first added the ability for developers to build their own channels, I was disappointed to see that there wasn’t a Picasa “channel” for the device…. but sometime between then and now, someone added one! Specifically, this guy, Chris Hoffman, appears to be the man behind the Picasa Channel for Roku.

hoffmancs’s Picasa plug-in for Roku on my Roku’s main menu (yes, the plasma is badly burned in)

Setup: the way it works is pretty simple: you first install the Roku channel and then when you go to access it, you’re given an access code to enter in on this page:
http://roku.chrishoffman.org/picasa

You pull up this page on your laptop/netbook/desktop/whatever and then you enter your “claim code”.

Then you’re asked to link the Picasa Roku Channel with one of your Google Accounts, via OAuth (which is much more secure than the Picasa channel asking you to give it your Google username and password).

Then, that’s it as far as setup goes!

Using it: From here, using this Picasa channel, you can:
– browse your albums
– browse your tags
– browse by some other things (that I don’t remember)

Albums menu option in hoffmancs’s Picasa channel for Roku

Some notes from my using it about 30-40 times now:

• I mostly use the “browse by albums” screen to choose an album and then start playing it back.
• Playback is automatically in “slideshow” mode, with the default delay being 3 seconds. You can change this on the settings screen.
• The Roku plug-in also seems to pre-cache four or five photographs — that’s the number of photographs I can quickly clickthrough before the app forces me to wait so it can load another photograph.
• It displays the entire photograph on your TV screen, so if it’s a portrait photograph, you’ll have large black areas to it’s left and right (which is the right thing for any slideshow viewer to do by default).
• Assuming you have your Roku hooked up to an HDTV and you have the Roku configured for 720p mode, it displays your photographs in beautiful high-definition (subject, I’m sure to whatever resolution you uploaded them at).
• It handles video: The Picasa channel for Roku also handle videos you’ve uploaded. Assuming you have an album that includes videos, when you choose that albums, you’re presented with a sub-menu of viewing the photographs in that album or the videos in that album. If you choose to view the videos, you are presented with a list of the vidoes and when you choose one, it buffers it and starts playing. I was surprised at how good the videos looked when played back through the app!

Bottom line? The Picasa channel for Roku is a big winner. The quality of the photographs is great. It handles videos. It nails my core use-cases. I’m already using this thing all the time, sharing photographs I’ve taken with my family, with friends that have come over. It’s great! I’m surprised that this thing hasn’t gotten more attention — the only really relevant google search result for “Roku Picasa Channel” is this thread in the Roku forums.

But like any good early adopter, I have my wish list of things that I wish this app handled:

1) multiple picasa account support: I wish this thing supported multiple accounts. In our family, my father and I take all the photographs — he uploads his to his own Picasa account and I upload to mine. Switching between accounts is a big pain right now (ie I’d have to go through the whole setup process described above). I wish I could configure one account and then another and then have it interleave the albums or even just let me then pick one account or the other. BTW, I noticed that the Picasa Web Albums viewer in Google TV (from when I tried out one of Sony’s new Google TV devices) supports multiple accounts.

2) album & photograph search: I don’t think the app supports searching my albums at this point. I have several years of photographs in Picasa Web Albums so going back to one from say 3 years ago involves my scrolling through a very long list of albums (they’re presented in reverse chronological order).

3) better “browse photographs in album” support: right now, I’m able to browse through photographs in an album, but the interface is a horizontal ribbon of all my photographs. Like Picasa’s web-based interface, I wish I would get a grid of photographs and then choose from a grid. When I have a large album (say 500+ photographs of a family trip to Europe), I may want to jump to a particular part of the album and doing that now, like browsing for an album from a while ago, is painful.

4) more robust account linking: I don’t know if I’ll see this happen again, but for some reason the Roku at my parents house loses it’s connection to the house wifi every so often. If you’re disconnected from WiFi (and Roku doesn’t give you a very good notification of this) and you try to access the Picasa Web channel, it fails and appears to disconnect you from your Picasa Web Albums account. Once you reconnect the Roku, you have to go through the setup process again.

5) better caching of photographs: like I mentioned above, the app appears to cache a handful of photographs but when you get to the end of that cache, which in my case happens after I click quickly through four or five photographs, then it stalls without any feedback that it’s loading the next photograph(s). I’ve figured this out, but I can guarantee this would confuse my Dad.

6) support for viewing other picasa web albums: Other people occasionally share picasa albums with me. I wish I could somehow take an e-mail with a link to a picasa web album and pull that up album up on my TV. I’m not sure exactly how this would work, but it would be useful and handy.

Anyhow, most importantly, thanks hoffmancs for the great Roku app, I’m using it all the time!

Update: here’s a slideshow of a lot of the screens (I took ’em using my iPhone’s camera):

Here’s a quick comparison of my beloved Acer 1810TZ-4174 and the new Apple Macbook Air 11″:

	Acer 1810TZ	Macbook Air 11″ (new)
Dimensions
length (in)	8	7.56
width (in)	11.2	11.8
depth (in)	1.2	0.68
weight (lbs)	3.1	2.3
screen (in)	11.6	11.6
USB ports	3	2
SD card slot	Yes!	No*
Flash memory	256MB**	64MB or 128MB
price	$550 + $580 = $1130***	$999 or $1199

* This is probably a deal breaker for me. I take a lot of photographs and being able to download them and quickly upload them online, all without any extra hardware is an important use case for me.

** I bought and replaced the 340GB drive that came with my Acer 1810TZ-4174 with a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD). My netbook isn’t instant on, but everything is definitely faster with the SSD.

*** cost of the base laptop + cost of the Crucial RealSSD C300 that I bought to replace the built-in hard drive.

I had a chance to play around with one of Sony’s new Google TV devices last week on Friday.

Some photographs of stuff running in the TV’s task manager:

Looks like a lot of services that mirror the state of the DVR– so that’s how they do that integration. In this particular setup, they had it setup and working with DirecTV. So I guess the idea that the DVR integration will only work with DISH, that there is some exclusive there, simply is NOT true.

Overall, the device seemed not so cohesive… a lot like early versions of Android felt. It was clear to me, from the 5-10 minutes I spent using the device, that it’s early days for Google TV!

Now that Logitech’s Revue product and Sony’s Google TV enabled TVs have been announced (or announced and “leaked” respectively) there are folks that are getting pre-disenchanted with Google TV:

• Am I Blind, Or Am I Just Not ‘Seeing’ What’s So Great About Google TV?
  
• Tweet by @StardotGarf: It’s difficult to make things simple. But Apple must have rolled on the floor laughing when they saw this: http://bit.ly/9DvizE
  

First of all, I disagree with the idea that there’s a bunch of hype around Google TV. There’s not, this comment is just reflects an insular tech community perspective.

Second, yes, I agree with the fact that Sony’s keyboard for Google TV is silly… I joked earlier this week that Brother should sue Sony for copying their label printer keyboards… then again, come on now, be honest, who *hasn’t* thought of using their Brother label printer to control their television!?!

And, yes, I agree that Logitech’s Revue is too complicated (see the What you Need section of this page… consumers do NOT want this!) and it’s priced too high ($299… without an input device!).

So I think Logitech’s Revue is going to flop and Sony’s products aren’t going to sell any better than any of their other TV products (which I would consider a flop, if I were Sony). I’ve seen lots of other companies try and sell “next generation” TV experiences to consumers and Logitech and Sony repeat a lot of the same mistakes (including some of the same mistakes we made at SnapStream with Beyond TV).

But you know what: It doesn’t matter if Logitech and Sony fail, Google TV is going to be JUST fine. Why? Because it’s F-R-E-E, free!! (or, eventually, less than free). The $99 (or less) Google TV box WILL come out. Google will keep improving the software stack, bringing more content into the fold, bringing more 3rd party apps into the mix, making web-browsing on your TV better and better. The price premium for Google TV on your cable or satellite set-top box, your TV, your Blu-ray player, etc. will eventually go to $0. Android’s doing this in smartphones and Google TV will do it in the TV category as well.

Personally, I’m not going to buy a new Google TV enabled Sony TV (even though I’m actually in the market for a new TV right now) and I’m definitely not buying a Logitech Revue. But I will buy the first halfway decent $99 or less Google TV box that comes out so I can play around with it and watch Google make the software better and better.

(Since FastCompany’s commenting system is terrible and won’t let me 1) register to comment or 2) use my twitter or facebook to comment, here’s my comment to their article)

I think Facebook would say this is an outlier and these guys should just click the easy to see “unsubscribe” button and get out of the group if they don’t want to be a part of it. It’s an outlier because only your “friends” can add you to a group and most people don’t have a gazillion, random people as friends like Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis do.

But on the flipside of things, has anyone has this feature “work” for them? Do people see these wonderful, natural intuitive groups automagically coming into existence? That’s the idea that they talked about… that this would be photo tagging where group creation just kind of happened in a natural and organic way. I haven’t seen any such groups cross my path just yet.

When the Facebook people talk about things that are “social” as a checkbox feature vs. things that are built as being social from the ground up, I have to say that it sounds like a bunch of BS to me. I don’t think the line is that pronounced.

I’ve been using Fonmigo’s mifi-like device while I’ve been traveling in the United Kingdom (aka UK aka England) this week.

It works well and I recommend the service. Of the options I looked at, this was the lower cost one. I think it’s costing me something like $10 per day (you can see their full price information on their website).

So far, I’ve mostly used it outside of London, in Wales. I’ve used it on the First Great Western train and it’s worked well. I’ve used it while in Swansea (a town in Wales) and it’s worked well. I even FaceTime’ed with my Dad from the train!

The device isn’t actually the Novatel Mi-Fi device, which has been popular in the States — it’s something similar, the Huawei E5830. One of the theoretical advantages of this device over the MiFi is it has all of these lights on the front that tells you its status.

The Novetel MiFi, in contrast, tries to communicate all status information through one light that changes colors and blinks at different frequencies. Which is to say, Hell if I ever know what the MiFi’s status indicator is trying to tell me! But the Huawei E5830, isn’t really a lot better: While the MiFi has only one cryptic light, the Huawei has FIVE of them! But the device definitely works, once you figure out how the different buttons make it turn on. Still, there’s an opportunity for some device maker to do a much better job.

I always worried about this when I switched my blog over to http://rake.sh/:

Bit.ly, HootSuite (with its Ow.ly service), Ad.ly and perhaps even Smel.ly could well be at risk of having their domain names sudden.ly taken away by the Libyan government. full article

So here’s to hoping that the Island of St. Helena doesn’t start yanking .sh domain names!

My sister called me to earlier today to ask me a random question: is there a way for me to send SMS messages from my computer?  Of course!, I told her.  Here’s the reply I sent her, in case it’s useful to anyone else:

Approach 1: Sending SMS using Google Voice

• Go to http://voice.google.com/
• Create yourself an account
• Now from http://voice.google.com/ you can send and receive SMS messages.
• The “from” phone number on these messages will be your Google Voice number.

Approach 2: Using Gmail’s chat feature to send SMS

• Google chat in Gmail has an SMS feature
• On any contact in your chat list, you can choose “send SMS” (it’s there in the options)
• It’ll ask you to enter a number for that person.
• Now, from now on, if that’s person’s offline or online, you can send them SMS through google chat.
• If they reply, it’ll show up in your google chat, archived in gmail.
• Note: there are limits to how many SMS messages you can send before you get a reply… a safeguard against the service being abused by spammers

I’ve been using the new Nike Plus iPhone app to track my runs… It’s really cool. It talks to you while you’re running, letting you know your pace for each mile you run and it uploads all the data to Nike’s website so you can chart your progress and get a view of your run on Google Maps with a speed gradient that shows you where you ran faster and where you ran slower.  I’m sure there’s more the the website, but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

Anyways, I carried my iPhone in my hand on my first run but that wasn’t any fun so I went looking for an iPhone armband that I could wear while running.  After poking around reading reviews on Amazon.com and reading random review through Google, last week I bought two armbands for my iPhone 4.  The first one, was the Apple iPhone 4 / iPhone 4G Black Mesh Sport Armband.  It’s not so good… it’s fit to the iPhone 4 but you have to remove the iPhone 4 from whatever case/bumper you have it in and then you have to really squeeze it into this thing to use it.  And once it’s in there, operating the screen is something you can only do by forcefully pushing the piece of thick plastic against the iPhone’s screen.  I can’t even say what it’s like when it’s actually fastened on your arm because I haven’t even tried it yet.

The other iPhone 4 armband I tried out was Grantwood’s Tuneband for iPhone 4 — this one works pretty well.

It comes with it’s own iPhone 4 cover and then the velcro armband slips through a slits on the back of that case.  I wear it slightly above my elbow and it stays in place while I run.  The armband is made mostly of a stretchy nylon (?) material so when you pull and apply the velcro, the whole thing is tensioned on your arm.  I don’t have huge arms but they aren’t that skinny either… with the length of the strap and location of the velcro, if my arms were any skinnier, I’d have to wear this thing higher on my arm, closer to my shoulder.  And there might even be some people whose arms are two thin for this particular strap.  But it works great for me!

I was surprised to see the name brands in iPhone cases (Belkin, Speck, etc) don’t have their own armbands for sports… There’s the  Nike+Armband for iPhone but it hasn’t been re-designed for the iPhone 4 — come on Nike!

The last thing I’ll say is that even though the Nike app is cool with it’s visualizations, GPS maps, Nike Plus website, etc. the is the iPhone feels a  little bit big to be carrying around on runs like this.  So maybe I’ll get one of those Garmin or Polar wristwatches instead.  Meanwhile, the Tuneband from Grantwood is my iPhone armband of choice, I recommend it!

Jason McElweenie did an SEO project for us at SnapStream and Piping and he did some great work for us (if you happen to visit our sites, a lot of the changes he recommended for SnapStream are pending a new site template that we’re still debugging). So, anyways I wanted to wish him best of luck with his new Houston-focused marketing agency, the “You Might Know Me” marketing agency.

Jason, JR and Kerri: best of luck to you all!

Some details from Jason’s email announcing the new venture:

You Might Know Me – A Marketing Agency
Partners: JR Cohen, Jason McElweenie, Kerri Ryan
Website (almost): www.ymkmagency.com
Phone: (713) 487-5112
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