AyeTea

Some applications for your PC are simply about getting a job done. Others do it in a way that will have your co-workers glancing over your shoulder eyes agog. Cooliris has always been the latter of the two. Quite simply its interface is both beautiful and useful. To put it into a simple statement, Cooliris browses images in an intuitive fashion that will blow your socks off!

Images are browsed upon a virtual 3d wall. You can drag the wall sideways as you browse watching your images slide by gracefully. It's a nice gallery of the many images you'll accumulate on any hard-drive over the years - screens of online bingo games, pictures of family and friends, or even home videos - Cooliris does all of this, and does it easily without monopolizing your RAM. If you see an image you want to look at in more detail, simply click on it and it will expand to fill your screen."

In the past though Cooliris was strictly a web browsing tool, that was until release 1.10. What the Cooliris team have introduced in this release is the feature that all Cooliris users have been secretly and not so secretly been wishing for, The ability to browse our own computers using the Cooliris interface. So how do you get some of this visual loveliness on your PC?

First things first head on over to the Cooliris website and download the latest version. click here to go to the site. Navigate to the home page if you are not there already and use the download button. Cooliris should through some browser trickery automate the install process for you. Bear in mind that you will need Windows XP or above for this to work

Cooliris works via your internet browser, currently supported browsers are: Firefox 2, Firefox 3, IE 6, IE 7, IE 8, Safari 3, Safari 4, Flock, Flock 2 and numerous operating systems are compatible with the software. Although the website does not list it as compatible, I am running Cooliris on my Windows 7 system with no apparent issues. Some of the Cooliris versions are listed as in Beta versions, so if your choice of browser is Internet explorer 8 or Safari 4, expect the odd glitch.

Once you have downloaded and installed Cooliris, you can do some cool things with it. Its worth taking a minute or two to set it up to your screen. Go to your start menu and find “Launch Cooliris” This will open you web browser with Cooliris activated. Look up to the top left corner and you will see the cog , clicking on this will open up your Cooliris options. The sliders here allow you to tailor the appearance of your Cooliris wall. I chose to use two rows of images because I have installed Cooliris on my EeePC901 Netbook. Two rows is about right for the miniature 9’ screen. If you are using a larger screen you will be able to display more rows.

You can adjust settings here for Cooliris's slideshow feature. Once you are happy with your selection, choose “Save and Launch” Cooliris should now launch with your settings in place. You can now choose to browse the web or your computer using the left hand navigation pane.

Several menus are available to you, Discover, Shopping , Favourites, and “My Computer”, each has it’s own submenus My Computer’s being the folders of your own machine.

Now you can browse either the web or your PC in three dimensions. Dragging your mouse sideways with the left hand button held down lets you slide the wall. Just be sure to start your grab by clicking outside of an image.

Clicking on an image has a different effect. This will expand the image to show a larger version.

A double click will expand the image further to a full screen view.

There is also a search bar on the top right hand corner of the screen where you can select to search from various Cooliris compatible sites. Currently supported are Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Hulu, Blinkx, Amazon, Flickr, Picasa and DeviantART.

Browsing the web has never been so captivating and easy. Be warned though there is something mesmerising about browsing images this way. It’s all too easy to lose and hour or two without even noticing,

I will update the site with more Cooliris tips and tricks as I discover them. Happy Browsing!