Google farewells apps in spring clean
Bye-bye Blackberry Sync, Picasa for Mac and Linux
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Mac users, it seems, haven’t embraced the ability to sync to Picasa to any great degree, with Google removing the platform from its Picasa service in its latest round of app spring cleaning.
Picasa Web Albums for Mac and Picasa Web Albums Plugin for iPhoto have both been unplugged from the machine-that-goes-ping, along with a slew of other services that seemed like a good idea at the time.
BlackBerry’s reinvention from rooster to feather-duster has landed it on the junkpile, with the Chocolate Factory telling users of Google Sync for BlackBerry that downloads will end June 1, and suggesting they switch to either the BlackBerry Internet Service or Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server.
The mobile Web app for GoogleTalk will be withdrawn, with customers redirected to native Android apps using GoogleTalk.
Also on death-watch are the One Pass publishing payment system; the WINE-based Picasa for Linux won’t be getting any new updates; and the short-lived experiment, Google Related, is being wound down so (in the kind of phrase that takes perfectly good words and strangle them) “the Related team can focus on creating more magic moments across other Google products”.
The spring clean also means new API deprecation policies. The Google App Engine, Google Cloud Storage, Google Maps/Earth and YouTube APIs are moving from a three-year deprecation policy to a one-year cycle. This change will happen in April 2014. On the Google Developer Blog, APIs product manager Adam Feldman also http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/changes-to-deprecation-policies-and-api.html writes that Google will “strive to provide one year notice before making breaking changes”.
Older APIs – too many to list here – are being retired, and Feldman is also giving notice that in April 2015, the deprecation policies for a number of APIs are being removed (the APIs themselves will remain).
The Google retirement announcement is here. ®
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COMMENTS
How can anybody now justify using Google APIs?
You put all your eggs in somebody else's basket, what do you expect?
I'm looking at moving all my calendar data off google to my NAS for synching - takes the data out of the belly of the beast...my email is already with a non gmail provider.
Other APIs? I'm not touching them with a bargepole - Microsoft did it with Silverlight, Adobe did it with Flash, Google do it to their APIs, best thing to do is avoid the lot - IT changes so quickly is it really worth getting up to speed with these things if they have THAT limited a lifespan? Better things to do with my time (like comment of the Reg).
Re: Why not go Open Source
Because picasa for linux was just a windows app that was tweaked to behave under wine.... if you know that, you see that it is easy to try to upgrade to a more recent version ;)
Other than that, boooooo at google for not supporting linux...
Re: idiot alert
Picasa for Linux has really been dead for years already: Only old version available, problems running on up-to-date distros. There also are as good or better native Linux applications for the same thing, so few people will miss it.
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