Childlike, in many ways, I retained that inquisitive nature which makes children so frustrating and adorable in equal measures.Not a thing escapes Isobel’s attention without the questioning of what is that daddy? The Internet gives me access to such a wealth of information and satisfies my urges as an information whore.Anything and everything that I am curious about gets Googled.I am not a passive reader and as I read an online article my searching and inquisitive mindset asks more questions, so easily distracted that I spider off on a random journey of discovery often not returning to the original source.
So it was good to add another tool to my browsing toolkit.I recently came upon an impressive Firefox 3 extension by Linkool Labs. Juice allows me to discover information in a sidebar area of the browser without disrupting my workflow. It’s easy to use - I select and drag a word or piece of text towards the sidebar and Juice searches its information sources such as Google news, YouTube and Wikipedia.Juice returns different content (such as blog posts, news, YouTube, videos, images etc) in tabbed categories. Juice achieves this using what the Linkool team describes Juice as an ‘intelligent discovery engine’.I can read the content or bookmark for later.Juice is also a media clipping tool and has the ability to capture images and video to a personal library.Juice stores the images or video in the side pane so later on you can browse your collection.
Juice integrates so well with my browsing experience. Well, that is when it works.Like many beta web apps Juice is temperamental.But I can forgive Juice for its flakiness as the Linkool team are actively working to address bugs and take on user feedback. It gets a thumbs up from me. I’m sure enhancements are on their way such as allowing a user to store your clippings so you can access them from any pc, customising the information sources that Juice queries, customising what side the results pane sits on, better labelling (why ‘magic’?) etc so Juice will just get better.
Juice is a free download so if you have Firefox 3 go grab this extension. This Firefox extension and more that help quench my thirst for information are covered in this excellent article – 9 Firefox extensions for the Information Whore.
In a previous postI recommended Flickr for organising and sharing collections of Interface Designs, and described how to create such a collection using Snagit with the Flickr extension to capture screen designs and send directly to Flickr.
Browsing these large collections in Flickr is not a great experience.With Flickr you either view an image then click 'back' to select the next image or browse images using the photostream.Both ways are clunky and a somewhat frustrating user experience.
So here's another extension to throw in to the mix which provides a slick interface to browse images, creating an all-round good experience for viewing an image collection on Flickr.Welcome Piclens.
Piclens is a free browser extension that interacts with Flickr to provide a full-screen interactive 3D wall of images.This is a browser add-on for Firefox and Internet Explorer (PC and Mac) as well as for Safari (been around on Safari for about a year now). Piclens offers a powerful and fast way to browse a wall of images.
Image: Piclens 3D wall (below)
Image: Piclens thumbnail viewer (below)
Piclens supports a number of image sharing applications such as Flickr, Photobucket, Facebook and many more.
It's so easy to use.Simply install it and then mouse over an image to see the Piclens icon. Click the Piclens icon to enter the full-screen interactive wall.I recommend you install it but if you need more convincing then check out Piclens on YouTube.
There are some drawbacks such as you can't save images directly from Piclens or view comments, and the image quality isn't great as Piclens appears to import the regular sized ‘display’ images as opposed to the largest size images you’ve uploaded.Despite these drawbacks Piclens does improve the online image browsing experience enormously and hopefully the chaps at Cooliris will address these flaws.By all account they are very fast to respond to customer feedback and enhance Piclens so I for one am looking forward to the next release.
So once you've installed Piclens you can enjoy creating and browsing collections of interface designs such as: -
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