Cooliris

by Eric March on October 18, 2008 at 2:02 pm

(1 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)

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App Name: Cooliris
Developer: Cooliris, Inc.
Category: Entertainment

Here’s one I wasn’t expecting.  In its original incarnation, Cooliris is a plugin for Firefox that lets you browse images across the web from Google Image Search, Flickr, and others, using a 3D “image wall” you can scroll through, tap on to view images, and even visit the originating pages.  It has recently introduced embedded ads in the form of images ads, movie trailers and other video ads, so it’s clearly found its business model — but it’s still pretty cool. It lets you search using keywords or has a “discover” mode that’ll pick images from a list of topics.

Now they’ve gone and made a native standalone iPhone version, and I have to say, it’s pretty damn, uh… cool.  You get the same photo wall as the desktop plugin, complete with pinch zooming, and you can scroll through the wall with a finger as per normal, or tilt your device left and right to auto-scroll.  Tap on an image and it’ll raise it from the wall and give you a larger, clearer view with textual details and the ability to send the image via E-Mail.  Tap again and it goes full screen with a hideable details overlay and pinch zooming and swipe to navigate to next/previous image. Where the details overlay is displayed you can tap on the details to display the originating web page through an embedded Safari browser — no need to jump out of Cooliris.  It searches Google, Flickr, Yahoo, SmutMug and DeviantArt for its images, there’s a vast array of imagery to discover and search for.

It’s a slick and cool way to browse photos on the web.  Obviously its performance isn’t as good as desktop broadband connections, especially over 3G, so your net connection speed will be a factor here.  Its performance with scrolling and displaying images though is almost as good as the desktop, though a tad jerky here and there, but nothing irritating.  I’d love to see this gain the ability to browse your camera roll.

It’s got a few relatively minor bugs, but overall, very nice job by Cooliris and a great photo browsing app.

UPDATE 10/23/08 @ 11:16pm: This appears to have gone 404.  The direct link is dead and it’s nowhere to be found on the App Store.  I’m going to see if I can get to the bottom of this.  (Thanks for the tip, Bonnie!)

UPDATE 10/25/08 @ 11:08am: Looks like it’s back.  Evidently there was a bug they had to squash so they voluntarily yanked it in order to fix it.  It’s back with a new item number, so the link has been updated.  (Thanks again, Bonnie)

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Posted in Entertainment