The Download Blog

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

(Credit: Torch Mobile)

Here's a fairly new, fairly stealth specimen for all you mobile browser buffs. The Iris Browser is a beta-only offering produced by Torch Mobile, a start-up that presented at last week's Under the Radar conference.

While the beta for Windows Mobile phones 5+ is publicly available, consumers won't likely be able to download it themselves in its full incarnation. The company will convert beta testers' feedback into a more robust product to sell to manufacturers, who will brand the browser as their own.

I've been trying out the Iris Browser nonetheless--it's got a full enough feature set to stand up to many of the third-party mobile browsers out there. Built on the open-source WebKit code, it's got a lot of what we already see in Opera Mobile, Skyfire, and Mozilla's mobile Firefox alpha, Fennec: search, various rendering views, zoom, bookmarking, a mouse, find in page, image capture, and tabs.

Iris Browser's resolution is good, but page loading was on the slow side. Because its mostly void of branding, it looks a little plain, but beta testers may appreciate the singular way it bounces when you switch tabs and the way links bubbles like boiled water when you click. For those of you Windows Mobile owners intent on browser comparison, Iris Browser beta is worth an informational look.

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.