CoolIris 1.8 Beta for Safari
Aug 19, 06:08 am
After a long absence, the plugin formerly known as PicLens has returned to Safari in style. Now called CoolIris, the PicLens plugin began as a Safari-only extension that allowed users to browse photo-laden sites, such as Flickr and Google Images, with a slideshow-like interface. Since, the makers of CoolIris migrated the software to Firefox, and then to IE, presumably focusing on these due to market share concerns. With their beta of version 1.8, CoolIris returns to Safari, and its functionality and speed is better than ever.
For someone like me, who trawls through online photos, relentlessly looking for Keynote presentations media, CoolIris is a boon. It allows users to quickly skim through very large numbers of photos (and now, movies) to find what they are looking for.
The Safari version of CoolIris places a slick button on the right hand side of the toolbar. Pressing the button on a CoolIris-enabled site (e.g. Flickr, Yahoo!, Google, PhotoBucket) displays all the photos it can find on a virtual wall. Trackpad or mouse gestures slide the wall left and right, and zoom in and out.
You can also search a handful of sites from within the CoolIris interface, or select from sets of predefined images — news, sports, entertainment, and more.
Of course, this is the first beta version of this software, so the usual warnings apply, but after a day of heavy use it has yet to crash Safari 3.1 or the WebKit nightly builds.
CoolIris 1.8 is a 3.8 MB download and requires Mac OS X 10.4.11+ and Safari 3.1.
Posted by Chris Fonnesbeck