This has pretty much nothing to do with gaming, but it is way too cool not to pass along. My bud and fellow buttonmasher, the Monkey, sent me a link to Pic Lens, a browser plug-in (it will auto-detect your browser) that is pretty much the Bee Knees. If you use Flickr, Google Image Search, Picasa, anything like that, it’s a must-see.
So why is it a must-see (and for that matter, a must-install)? Because it takes image browsing to the next level. Kicking it up a notch, as it were, if your Flickr stream were some shrimps and Pic Lens was Emeril. What it does, in a nutshell, is take an image stream and “Apple-ify it”. Think a little Cover Flow in iTunes (originally from this guy) but better. Pic Lens tiles the images in a manageable arrangement. You can then view the images in “3D”, scrolling through them much quicker than you would be able to if you were simply viewing the Flickr page, for example. You can click an individual image to enlarge in and then use your mouse scroll wheel to zoom in and out. It is very slick.
It’s also a very smart program. If you’re looking at a Flickr group (Explore, for example) that spans mulitple pages, Pic Lens is smart enough to retrieve everything in that stream. It is very slick.
After installing the plugin, when you mouse over an image, you’ll see a little “Play” button. Clicking on the play button brings up Pic Lens and grabs all the images it can associate with the image you clicked on (a Flickr stream, a Google Image Search). Then it’s surf’s up!
The only thing I don’t like is the inability to get any image information (source, tags, comments) but that is an enhancement that could always be added. It hardly detracts from the coolness that is Pic Lens.
So yeah, nothing here about gaming (although the Halo 3 Flickr Feed was fun to surf) but something I find extremely cool and thought you would, too.
Actually, come to think of it, didn’t the Flickr guys try their hands at an MMO (The Game Neverending or something) and then they envisioned Flickr as a game? See, it’s all related!
Hey Tony and readers,
Thanks for blogging on PicLens — we’re glad to hear you all have decided to try it!
We plan on adding a lot of new features in the coming months and viewing metadata like comments and image properties is something we are considering, as it is a popular request among our users. So hang in there!
It’s hard to really capture the awesomeness of PicLens in words (after all…ONE picture is worth a thousand, and we have a whole wall of them!), so here are links to two videos demos that give you an idea of what all the PicLens excitement is about. The first is by our team and the other by a PicLens fan.
http://www.piclens.com/demo
http://youtube.com/watch?v=uRG40tqC8dM
Thanks, again.
Meg & The Cooliris Team
@Meg – Thanks for the comment and the videos. I’m a huge fan of PicLens and I tell everyone I can about it. Keep up the totally great work.