Cooliris: Try it out now!
August 14th, 2008 Posted in Gadgets, Reviews
Mihoko has come across a new little app that plugs in to your browser and provides a new way to search. One of the many new visual search engines, Cooliris gets a lot of things right.
One — it’s fast and smooth. This is very important. Considering Google fills a page with hits almost instantly, it would have been no competition if its competition couldn’t provide the same. Of course, it’s not as fast, but at least you get to peruse things rather quickly. That said, it should be mentioned at this point that Cooliris is not a regular search engine — it’s a picture/video search engine. It’s more for fun than for research.
Two — the design is great. open up the application and you’ll find yourself looking at a wall of pictures. You can then scroll through the wall in pseudo-3D, or you can make it full page and scroll across in 2D. 3D is definitely the way to go — it looks and feels great, if a little fast. Click on a picture you like, and you get a little description, as well as a link to the page it came from. Nice.
Three — it does photos through Flickr and videos through Youtube, and hooks up to Amazon as well, so you can search for things to buy as well as search through the most popular sites for photos and videos, and it’s all done really well. In that way, it covers a lot of what you might be wanting to do, all in the one place. There is also a ‘discover’ button you can use down the left of the screen, and using this you can flick through (US and International) news, as well as Entertainment, Movies, and Science genres (among others), in a way resembling Stumbleupon (but not as good, of course). I’ll be checking out a few movie previews after I finish this, I think.
Of course… it’s not without its flaws. The important thing to remember is that it’s NOT a replacement for Google. In a way, it complements it. You wouldn’t use this to search for a web page or for information — it’s designed to show you the latest videos and photos, and link to the stories they came from… And that’s all. This it does well.
But not perfectly. It could really do with some date stamps. I was flicking through the news and saw a story about an earthquake in America… From two weeks ago. The only way I knew when was by going into the story itself to see the date on the article. I shouldn’t need to do that.
Also, video doesn’t play full screen, and it can occasionally lose the sync between video and sound — a fault of the programming and not the download speed. Of course, this should change as the program is updated, but still…
Lastly, a few suggestions (hopes) for future additions — regional news (it would be nice to be able to choose your region), the ability to select Youtube, Flickr, or Amazon, and simply peruse the most popular items, or just flick through what’s there… A search shouldn’t be required. And a game button wouldn’t hurt… I’m sure they’d be able to get flash games, etc., functioning just fine within the confines of the window…
Anyway, Cooliris (previously called PicLens) has become a new favourite of mine. While it’s not better than Stumbleupon at the moment, it might become that way — for pictures and video at least. The layout is much better, and the beauty lies in the fact that it doesn’t set out to replace anything… Just support it. Try it out.
Update: I was wrong about the full screen button — it apparently DOES make it full screen, and more than that, it doesn’t change the view to a 2D wall… That was my error (I only used it once for a very quick time, and that was my impression).
Thank you for posting about Cooliris! We truly appreciate it. We’re delighted to hear that you are enjoying Cooliris and we hope your readers will too.
You’ve raised some great points - we hear you! We are working on the sound sync issue with videos. However videos should play full screen if you double click it. If you’re having issues, please feel free to drop us a line at bugs@piclens.com.
Also, today we just released Cooliris 1.8 with sharing and the new Cooliris for Developers. You can check it out at http://cooliris.com.
Thanks again,
Luna and The Cooliris Team
No worries — it’s good to see that some developers really are interested in seeing what the general population think about their product! Thanks for reading!