I haven’t tried out the new Picasa yet, but this is one more app that would be a great candidate for ink.
Think about it. Here are just a few ways ink could give Picasa even more pizazz:
* Support handwritten captions. Ink captions would give a very personalized appearance. And if ink were supported on the online side as an option (when sharing photo collections), you could have Picasa-style “year books” that everyone could sign in ink too.
* Support ink art. Draw smileys, circles, arrows, comics, or whatever to add art details to your photo collection.
* Use the pen for editing images. Want to crop an image? Draw a box with the pen and snap the handdrawn shape into a crop region. Want to lighten part of an image? Select a lightening brush and paint over the area you want lighter. Of course, there would be nothing preventing you from simply drawing a mustache in ink over someone’s picture too. But either way, the pen is a great tool for editing photos.
It’s at times like these that I wish Google (which own Picasa) had a community source sharing model with some of their products. I doubt they’ll add ink to Picasa anytime soon, but what if community developers could add the feature on an experimental basis?
Notice I didn’t say “open source” model. It could be, but I think there are many alternatives. One that might sound scary to the lawyers, but is a possible alternative to giving the whole world your code is to leverage source sharing with a select group of community developers. Let them experiment and enhance the app or part of it. (And yes, there’s no reason why you couldn’t pay them for any additions you ultimately select, if you want to incentivize it.) What they learn may inspire third party apps to grow your product’s ecosystem. What you gain is more knowledgeable, technical advocates of your products and potentially an expanded feature set.