Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

Posted: 24 Jul 2009 03:04 AM PDT

Cooliris is one of today's coolest Firefox addon. It is the most recommended Firefox add-on by my friends and I can't remember anything else that generated more buzz than Cooliris. With the new version you can show off your 3D Wall by sharing its URL, you can bookmark 3D views you want to revisit, multiple tabs support, and video. It was previously known as PicLens.

For beginner with Cooliris, it lets you browse images on a plain black wall and all the images on the site will appear with nothing else on it. You can click on an image to enlarge it. If it’s a still image, it simply enlarges. If it’s a video, it enlarges and starts playing.

You can use your mouse's wheel to zoom in and out of the pictures. Dragging the mouse button on a side will cause everything to fly on the direction of your mouse.

If you are viewing FLickr images the tags associated with the images are subtly located at the lower part of the image so they are not a distraction to viewers:

The new website also offers it's own content like channels containing the photos of the day, news, sports, sci-tech and other categories.

It seems like it is tapping into the Digg formula where users can submit pictures and have the most popular content show up in the page… err wall.

Its shopping interface also improved with support to show the product's art work and description:

By the way, there is also an IPhone version as shown here.

It also supports viewing of locally saved images from your computer:

Well you have seen the good side so now let me show you the bad side of Cooliris. If you use it in 3 or more tabs you could really slow down your computer as it consumes a huge amount of memory. In my case, only after viewing my local pictures it ate more than 580MB or RAM!

That is too much RAM for an add-on so I am sure we will see improvements on its next release. For now we will settle for small to medium sized web-based pictures but the high resolution pictures and videos might not perform well on average systems.