But starting today, a browser add-on called Cooliris (formerly known as Piclens) is available in a new version, 1.10. It brings flashy 3D effects to browsing, and it is, indeed, cool-mostly because it’s useful. Cooliris works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, and runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux, and lets you browse massive quantities of images and/or videos from an array of sources-Google Images, Flickr, Facebook, Hulu, Picasa, your own computer, and many other venues-by zipping through a full-screen wall of tiny images that flies around in 3D space. (Its extremely reminiscent of the video-wall imagery Apple uses to promote Apple TV.)
I just popped it into the Safari 4 beta and found it to be Not Awful. I’m not sure I’ll be flipping over to it every time I do an image search, but it fits right into the Safari 4 “What’s New” and “History” pages.
Not to mention that they have an app for doing the same thing on the iPhone
It’s fun, I have it on my iTouch 2G and macbook 4,2
It’s become my preferred mode for doing really hardcore image searches. When a hit somewhere between #1 and #10 is likely to be fine, I don’t bother, but if I need to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, that plugin is my magnet-enhanced threshing device.
Finally, its available for Linux… Ive been waiting about a year for it. Had it on my Firefox in Windows and loved it but when I switched to Ubuntu, it didn’t work!
I use the iPhone app more often than the browser plugin because I find it’s great for showing things to people. One example: I have an MGB that gets parked for the winter and when people ask me what it looks like I can fire up CoolIris on my Touch and flip through various examples (no, I don’t have any decent pictures…). It works MUCH better than using Google image search on an Touch/iPhone. For one thing, it’s seamless and doesn’t break results down into separate page. For another, you can finger-flip through the pics, as you would expect, and pinch-zoom in for details. It’s a 5-star iPhone app, in my opinion.
i’ve been using this with firefox for about a year now. when you want to run through a google image search quickly, it is wonderful.