The Download Blog

Cooliris has just released a new version of its add-on that lets users run multiple instances of its media browsing wall in different tabs of the same browser. Previously, the only way to get it to run like this was to open it in different browsers. This way you can have one tab open to search YouTube videos, another that's browsing online photos, and a third that's playing a TV show off of Cooliris' Hulu.com interface.

Users are only limited in the number of Cooliris tabs they can have by what their computer is capable of. I ran four or five quite easily, and I can't see users needing more than that.

The company is also making it easier to share exactly what you're looking at on your Cooliris wall with others. It now creates a special Cooliris URL for each piece of media you click on. That link takes whoever you send it to, to the Cooliris media wall in the context of however you found that piece of media--that is, if they have the software installed. If they don't, the link won't take them anywhere, something the company says will change in a future iteration that will show a preview or link to the source in some way.

Right now these sharing URLs are quite long, although I'm told an internal shortening service is in the works. This will make it easier to share on places like Twitter and Facebook. This isn't just for users though, it's also for advertisers. These new links give Cooliris another way to track both incoming, and outgoing links. Up until now the company has been doing this internally. With this new system it's letting third party analytics tools like Google and Quantcast aggregate their own metrics.

Right now this new version only works on Firefox (Windows or Mac) and Internet Explorer but it will be headed to Safari users in the near future. Other small changes include a complete redesign of the scroll bar that lets users navigate around the wall of thumbnails. I've compiled this, and some of the other new features in a quick video embedded below:

CoolIris for iPhone has just received a hot update...and we do mean hot. New on the list of features is the capability to turn Google's SafeSearch on or off, which according to the company was one of the most requested features. The app remembers your preferences between sessions, giving you a wider gamut of results that can be, well, NSFW.

Why is this so important? If you're familiar with Apple's app store reviews process and guidelines you'll know the company has been rather stringent. So much so, it won't even let you view the personals section or naughty words in Craigslist apps. With the right search terms, the new version of this application can become a quick way to get at adult content. If that's what you're going for, that is.

To be fair, the update isn't about making it an adult-oriented app. Rather, it's to bring along some of the features found on its desktop counterpart. This update comes with a very mellow UI update that makes most of its preferences and features available no matter what you're doing. And just like in the desktop version, users are now able to bookmark any items or RSS feeds, as well as see those items they've bookmarked from their computers. To share any of that content with the outside world, there's also a new "tweet this" option that will send whatever you're looking at as a Twitter message.

This is still one of the best way to search for images on the iPhone, and one of the most intuitive ways to use CoolIris since you can simply zoom around with your fingers, or by tilting your phone. See our initial impressions here.

CoolIris' new look on the iPhone makes most all of the menu options available from any screen--including the option to turn Google's SafeSearch off.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Photo and video enhancer Cooliris (download) has launched an updated version of its browser add-on that brings new features including support for viewing local media, file specific metadata, and a Facebook photo viewer that shows user name tags. It's also available--for the first time, to Linux users.

A few weeks ago I met with Shashi Seth, Cooliris' chief revenue officer, and Austin Shoemaker who is the company's CTO to talk about the release, which they say has addressed some of the top requests from their users. The biggest being the capability to view local photos and videos from their computer's hard drive inside of Cooliris' 3D media wall, which users on all three platforms can now do.

Local files now show up in the content source list, kind of like iTunes.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

This basically turns your browser into an ad-hoc media center, something Shoemaker says has been created to be a unified experience across multiple platforms. For instance, if you're on a Mac, it links up with iPhoto, and if you're on a PC, it organizes your "my pictures" folder by album. Either way, you see your stuff without telling the service where to go to find it.

But what about Web content you ask? It's also been given a boost--literally. The new version has a visual effects engine that take better advantage of users' graphics hardware. For Mac users the tool is using OpenGL, and on Windows it's Direct 3D. Seth says it runs lean enough that most hardware from the last five years or so should have no problems with it. In my brief testing I ran it on a 3- year-old PC with barely a hiccup, however it's noticeably smoother on my other machine with a beefier graphics card.

Additionally, the tool now displays a much broader selection of metadata from selected sites. When viewing photos from Picasa Web Albums and Google Image search, or videos from YouTube, it now shows things like view count, user ratings, exposure, aperture, and resolution. This unfortunately... Read more

As performance reasserts its prominence and features become less of the driving force behind browsers, I find myself looking at the list of inactive extensions in Firefox with jaundiced eyes. It's been months since I've added a new extension, but the ones I still have I use regularly, and several are actually new to me for this year.

Cooliris, formerly known as PicLens, turns photos and videos into moving walls of imagery.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Part of the problem with add-ons is that they're such a personal, subjective thing. What do you need? Why do you need it? One of my favorites is a minor, tiny thing, but it saves me so much time that I have trouble when I use browsers without it. Dragdropupload gives you the ability to drag a file from your desktop into any text field in a Web page. Lightweight but extremely effective, if you e-mail a lot of attachments, this should quickly become a massive time saver.

I use it at work to drag images into form fields that then upload them to the CNET servers. Instead of having to navigate that obnoxious folder tree, I just drag the file and drop it into the appropriate field.

One of the problems with Dragdropupload is that sometimes Firefox updates break it, and it takes me a while to bring it back to life. There are two user-end solutions to solve that conundrum, but both are somewhat risky. Using either Nightly Tester Tools or MR Tech Toolkit, you can use the override compatibility feature to force Firefox to recognize outdated extensions. However, as I've noted before, this greatly increases the chance of having Firefox crash on you.

Nightly Tester Tools can revitalize dead extensions...for a price.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you can't find the same feature replicated elsewhere. I used to force compatibility with AutoCopy, another tiny little extension that introduces Linux-style compatibility to Firefox. Since I do a lot of cutting and pasting, AutoCopy and its multiple clipboards and automatic functionality make it a must-have for me. The mileage you can get out of it may vary with use, of course.

I have one frivolous extension installed: Cooliris. For compatible Web sites such as Flickr, YouTube, and Amazon, it introduces a bit of a futuristic vibe to browsing the Web. Your display turns into a full-screen wall of images, smoothly zooming in and out. It makes me wish that we all had Minority Report-style interfaces to work from instead of these comparatively-clunky mice.

Session Manager offers in-depth tools for saving and restoring sessions.

(Credit: Session Manager)

The last new-to-me add-on that I still use is Session Manager. Besides resurrecting crashed browsing sessions, it also lets you save current ones and keep them for later. You can configure how the sessions are named, change the default saved-sessions' location, encrypt saved-session data, and configure how post data gets saved, even from encrypted Web sites. Since each session file created by Firefox includes text data, cookies, and history, as well as tabs, being able to recreate all that information effortlessly is incredibly helpful and shouldn't be underestimated.

If you've got an extension that you've discovered in the past year and can't imagine how you got by without it, tell me in the comments below.

Cooliris has put out a useful update to its iPhone application that adds YouTube videos to its search results. This joins the image search that made the application so popular to begin with.

You might be asking yourself how this is helpful since the iPhone comes with an official YouTube application. The answer to that is that Cooliris' presentation is slightly more appealing. Where the official YouTube app forces you to scroll down a long list, with Cooliris you can simply rock your phone back and forth an endless array of thumbnails until you find something you like. Videos play back in a YouTube window, then you're brought back to the search results. It's smooth and it works well.

Cooliris has also managed to fix one of my big qualms with the earlier version, which would not let you save images from the image search results. With the new version there's now an option to save the full resolution version (not just a screenshot) with one button. The picture goes straight to your camera roll and you can keep on using the application. Again, this is a drastically better system than having to snap a screenshot.

You can now get YouTube video search as a part of Cooliris' iPhone application.

(Credit: CNET Networks / Josh Lowensohn)

The mobile application continues to be a shell of its desktop self, which integrates with a wide range of sites, and can be programmed to work with your own blog or Web site. While Apple's SDK won't allow such deep integration with other iPhone applications, Cooliris continues to pack in more sites and sources into this one.

Cooliris is free and can be found on the App Store (iTunes link). If you've already got it installed, and the 1.2 update isn't showing up, just delete the app from your phone and re-download it.

Over the weekend Cooliris, one of my personal favorite Firefox add-ons released a really slick iPhone application that lets users search for images on Google, Flickr, Yahoo, SmugMug and DeviantArt just like they would on their computer browsers. The big difference is that you're simply able to swipe through the results with your finger, or tip your phone from side to side to navigate, which is wonderfully gratifying and natural.

Each search brings in the results in a three-image high wall that goes on nearly forever, and loads in as you continue to scroll to the right. Any photo can be zoomed into, and includes a link to the origin story, which can be opened up without kicking you back out to Safari.

Search Flickr, Google, Yahoo and others for photos on a giant, zoomy wall with Cooliris for iPhone.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Besides the search tool, there's also an explore mode called discover that loads up the latest photos in one of five topics: election 08, news, sports, tech and business. These photos update throughout the day and are selected by where you are, meaning someone using the application in a different country is going to see a completely different list of items.

In future versions I'd like to see support for videos (like its desktop counterpart is capable of), however my most wanted feature is a way to save high quality copies of the images right to the phone. The built-in screenshot tool does a pretty good job until you want to start cropping. For a 1.0 product though, it's off to a great start.

Cooliris for iPhone is free. Embedded after the jump is a quick demo video of how it works.

Cooliris for Firefox (formerly PicLens) is an add-on for Firefox that makes viewing images much more elegant and fun. Once installed, you can simply perform a search for images at a Cooliris-enabled site--like Google, Flikr, or Amazon--to bring up a full-screen 3D wall of results. Grab the bar at the bottom to watch your wall of results scroll by smoothly on your screen. When you find an image or movie you like, click on it to get a larger view. Cooliris also lets you search from within the interface by category or by site with its Discovery tools.

For more info about Cooliris for Firefox, check out this First Look video.

PicLens, which we've covered before, is a browser plug-in that replaces the typical photo viewer you use on sites like Flickr. It's recently been updated, and if you haven't checked it out lately, now's the time. It's stunning.

The plug-in, which works in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Flock, and Safari (where it's a bit limited), lets you create a moving wall of images where you'd otherwise just see your Web app's more static display of pictures. Launching the viewer is just a matter of clicking a new "play" icon that appears on images when you're on a PicLens-supported site.

Sort of like CoverFlow, and in a very good way.

You can fling the wall backwards and forward to see images in the list, zoom in to full-screen versions of files with a double-click, or start a slideshow. It's a very Mac-like experience.

You also get a search bar in the viewer, which can scan for tagged images on Google, Yahoo, Flickr, PhotoBucket, SmugMug, and DeviantArt. The plug-in itself recognizes images from more sites, including Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Picassa Web Albums, and AOL Images.

I use it to keep my kid entertained (a slideshow of helicopters will quiet him right down). It really is a better experience than the standard search, view, and slideshow experience you usually get.

There's no embeddable version of the PicLens view yet. I'd like to see that.

CoolIris, which makes PicLens, is nicely funded by Kleiner-Perkins, and as yet has no system to make money from the service. Expect ads in the system to come once the user base has grown. Until then, you can enjoy this sweet product without commercial interruption.