I’ve used Picasa for over 10 years to manage my family’s photo library. We have about 50,000 images in there with 22,000 tags, stars, album memberships, etc. Now that Picasa will no longer be supported by Google, I had to find a replacement. And it really hasn’t been easy. I thought I’d share my strategy for anybody who might be in a similar situation.

I recently discovered that my Galaxy S7 Edge was reporting its display resolution as 640dpi, when I expected it to be approximately 534dpi. What’s the big deal, you ask? Well, it’s causing dynamically sized elements on screen to be approximately 17% bigger than they were intended to be drawn. Some users might like this, as it will make elements just a little easier to tap on. But others might not like it, because you can’t display as much information on the screen.

We’ve enjoyed using our Amazon Echo for the past few months. Its built-in features provide some useful and fun capabilities, but the availability of the Alexa Skills Kit promises to really help the device maximize its potential. ASK allows third-party developers to build “skills” to add all-new features to Echo. Naturally, I couldn’t help but take a stab at building an Alexa Skill myself.