Fireblog

A really nice piece of web kit has just caught my usually very cynical attention. It’s called PicLens and is a very simple to install extension for browser of choice, Firefox.

Simply put, it’s a reinvented picture search engine that piggybacks on your usual image sites such as google, flickr and deviant. It has a lovely, easy to use, immersive and animated interface - But somehow still manages to deliver the speed aspect so often overlooked by developers. It feels faster than raw html and how can that be? I haven’t dug down into what platform it uses or whether it is accessible to 100% of all users, but I really don’t care - It works reeeeaaally well for me, and I’m the most difficult digital consumer I know. This is going to make searching for non-stock imagery so much more fun and pleasant.

I suppose my only gripe at the moment is that you cannot just click and drag images into a lightbox or file saving device. You are also not able to ‘rightmouseclick’ on an image and save directly from the interface; You have to launch a window back into Firefox to get that functionality back again. I imagine it’s to stop people easily nicking images, however, I don’t see how that’s conducive to the open source nature of the web today.

It also does not currently carry any advertising and a small gremlin inside me whispers in my ear - They’ll wait till they have a million+ users before they bombard you with car insurance ads. But let me stop right there, this is a positive blog article - The world is a lovely place and this product rocks. I urge you to install it.

piclens, image search, interface design, firefox extension

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 12:32 pm and is filed under Useful stuff, The dog speaks, Photography, What's pressing our buttons?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.