Cooliris helps showcase photos and videos
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Cooliris
GemFest 2009
- GemFest 2009 begins
- AirRadar surveys your wireless signals
- Application Wizard makes program...
- AppShelf tracks software licenses
- Add an OS 9-like app menu to OS X with...
[Editor’s note: The following review is part of Macworld’s GemFest 2009 series. Every day until the end of June 2009, the Macworld staff will use the Mac Gems blog to briefly cover a favorite free or low-cost program. Visit the Mac Gems homepage for a list of past Mac Gems.]
Scrolling and clicking on Next links through tons of Web pages is not how I want to hunt down an elusive video or photo. Thankfully, there’s Cooliris, a super-handy browser plug-in that lets you scope out images and video content in a unique way, displaying everything in a full-screen, horizontally expanded, interactive 3-D “wall” view. It effectively eliminates the repetitive click-and-scroll tedium so you can find what you’re looking for fast.
Once you install the plug-in (which works with Firefox, Safari, and Flock), simply visit any supported Web site and either click the Cooliris button in your browser’s toolbar or mouse over a thumbnail and click the icon. Cooliris then takes over your screen, displaying all the page’s image or video content, plus all related content from subsequent pages, on the 3D wall. Searching through hundreds of Google images, YouTube videos, and Facebook photos has never been easier. And it works with your hard-drive-based images too, including those in iPhoto.
The browsing experience is interesting. Drag the slider at the bottom of the screen left or right and the wall suddenly flows into a 3-D space, yawing left or right as you fly past a multitude of seemingly never-ending thumbnails. It kind of feels as if you’re propelling yourself in an office chair past a gazillion TV displays in a dark, cavernous room with polished floors. I almost got motion sickness--it’s that smooth.
Once you find a desired image or video, click its thumbnail to get a bigger view or play the video, respectively. You can also view file info (such as a photo’s file size and dimensions, or a video’s length and YouTube rating), view an image full screen, play a photo slide show, jump to the actual file in the Finder, share files, and more. Cooliris also provides a Search function to scour content across Google, YouTube, Amazon.com, Hulu, Flickr, and more. Don’t know where to start? Click the Discover menu to gain access to popular content.
While my first take on Cooliris was that it was something of an eye-candy browser accoutrement, it’s now my go-to tool whenever I need to search through multiple pages of image or video content. My wrist has never been happier.
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[Kris Fong is a freelance writer.]
GemFest 2009
GemFest 2009 features great free and low-cost software for your Mac.
Increasingly, the airwaves around us are a jungle of competing wireless signals. Koingo Software’s...
Application Wizard--which operates as an OS X System Preferences pane--displays four colored...
If you need to track licenses and registration information for a large number of applications,...
If you who miss the OS 8/9-style application menu, two programs, ASM and multiXFinder, aim to fill...
If you’d prefer a simpler way to work with disk images, Click Archive is one such solution.
This program aim taps into iPhoto's Faces feature so you can attach images to Address Book entries.
GlimmerBlocker is an ad blocker that is safe to install because it doesn’t hack Safari.
If you find yourself inundated with a huge assortment of documents that are difficult to track, a...
FileBrowse is a beautiful, well-made media browser program, though how useful you find it will...
Zipeg is a free utility that’s useful to keep around as a complement to OS X’s built-in archiving...
If you juggle work all day and find yourself switching from one set of apps to another, you can...
Wx is a meteorological program that is for anyone who’s serious about the weather.
If you regularly receive winmail.dat files from business associates, Letter Opener is well worth...
Riverfold Software's Clipstart is to video clips what iTunes is to music, or iPhoto is to digital...
Do you find the standard OS X Address Book too limiting? If so, BdContacts might be just the...
Typically, while using your Mac’s iSight camera with one program, you can’t use it with another....
Have you ever wondered what a non-Apple software installer actually installs? Or what files a...
If you work extensively at cooking or event planning, or you’re just intensely organized and...
Digital Sentry is an aptly named program that monitors your computer for any of a number of events.
This simple program aims to fix the problem of lost or forgotten warranties by providing you with...
Full-featured accounting programs like QuickBooks can seem overwhelming and complicated. For...
Monitor is a small and lightweight freeware application that seeks to put these regularly visited...
Precipitate is a System Preference pane that lets Spotlight search your Google Docs, Google...
Tweetube is a complementary app to the third-party service of the same name that allows you share a...
Yum 3.0.7 is a solid, no-frills recipe manager, but its lack of some key features may have you...
If you want to use the same custom location several times in iMovie '09, you can use...
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DeskCover is a free program that adds a customizable background behind the icons on your desktop.
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Whether you’ve deleted photos, reformatted your media card, or had a card go bad, Klix recovers...
Photo Wrangler makes it easy to quickly scan through a folder of photos and sort them into separate...
Rife as Mac OS X already is with slide-show capabilities, PhotoPresenter builds onto those and puts...
For image editing, Sumo Paint offers many Photoshop standbys. And best of all, this Web-based...
With ViewIt, you can simply drop your camera’s photos onto the ViewIt window, view and mark what’s...
You’ve probably heard about the Faces feature in iPhoto ‘09 that makes it quick and easy to find...
As great as video sharing Web sites like YouTube are, they often don’t allow you to directly...
Shape Collage turns a collection of photos into a collage of practically any shape, whether you’re...
Aquafadas’s PulpMotion produces professional multimedia presentations that are anything but...
When you want to create iTunes playlists based on tempo or need to find the BPM of your songs,...
VideoDrive aims to make video conversions easy.
Cooliris is a super-handy browser plug-in that lets you scope out images and video content in a...
SousChef is a recipe organizer with an iTunes-RSS feed sensibility that can help you get your meal...
If you have an even moderately large media library and like the idea of having everything neatly...
As a grand finale to GemFest 2009, here’s a list of some of our all-time favorite Mac Gems.