Thursday, April 24, 2008

I Love PicLens.

I know I babbled about Cool Iris before. It's a Firefox Add-On that allows you to hover your cursor over a link and have a kind-of window shade unfold to show you what's at the link without actually leaving the page you're on.

I downloaded PicLens a little while back and while I thought it might be kinda cool, it was still a little buggey. It seems they've worked out the bugs, and yay, I pronounce it awesome. The link will take you to the version for Firefox on mac, but there are links for other browsers and for Windows as well. There's also, apparently something for you WordPress bloggers that I didn't look at too closely, because, I'm not one of you, but I bet that's cool too.

Take the tour and download this immediately.

Update: One thing that still doesn't work when you're using PicLens...If you're searching GoogleImages for some generic picture to use on your blog...it's not very useful. If you're doing the normal search and just going through the pages of pictures, you can just drag the picture to your desktop (at least on a Mac) and bingo. If you're looking through them in PicLens, you can't drag it to your desktop and you have no idea what page it's on in the GoogleSearch. Technically, this probably doesn't count as a bug, just a missing feature that would be nice to have.

4 comments:

MWT said...

Over at Livejournal, they have Snapfish for that. Unfortunately it's set to be on by default, and it can really lag up a page. I'm quite happy just to be able to see the link address without seeing a snapshot of what it looks like.

Nathan said...

Well, that's the thing though...it's not one of those annoying little snapshots. It opens at about 3/4 the size of the window you've got open and you can actually read the thing or go to further links on it if you want. It'll stay there as long as you keep your cursor somewhere in its borders. Then as soon as you move the cursor off of it...it disappears and you're right back where you started.

The PicLens thing is great partly because I'm used to having to show 'slideshows' of location photos and they go slow as shit. With PicLens, everything flies and you can bring it closer or even full screen with a click. For me, at least, it's a wonderful thing.

MWT said...

In my case, I'm clicking zillions of dragon eggs and hatchlings (it's a click exchange LJ community). That popup gets in the way, and a larger one would just be much worse. So it's not terribly useful if you actually want to go to the page at the link, not just look at it for a second.

Nathan said...

OK, more refined explanation.

You have to hover over the link and then a little blue icon shows up somewhere along its length. The link doesn't open until you move the cursor to the little icon.

I very rarely open a link by accident.