Sun.com Web Experience Design: Notes from the sun.com design team

I was pointed to this by one of my excellent flickr contacts. If you've ever struggled through multiple pages of photo pools or even your own photostream looking for that particular image, or just to have a browse around, you'll know that there's still the page-at-a-time top-level filter to most of those operations. There are any number of aggregators out there which might do something different, and yes, you could probably just take an rss feed and roll your own viewing platform, but, you know, I'm not going to do that.

So hallelujah for PicLens. Not only does it do wonderous things with a photoset, pool, contact list, comments list etc., it also happens to manifest itself as a firefox plugin. Not necessarily a big deal you might say, but this is the most un-firefox plugin firefox plugin I've come across. It doesn't just sit in your browser and do neat things, it takes over your entire screen and throws photos around in a 3-dimensional space, offering views of multiple images that you just can't get otherwise. Honestly, it breathes a whole new life into an old photostream and makes you re-evaluate those photos you've seen over and over for the last 5 years. Brilliant

It does allow you to change views, so you can make it look like Adobe Bridge (on a day where Adobe bridge isn't taking 99% CPU and crashing your computer), but its the flying-around-in-space views that really make it interesting. Of course, if you have a 1920x1200 desktop, you need something quite hefty to iron out the judders, but, being a designer, I've obviously got far more horsepower than I need anyway, so it flies along nicely. Do try it. Its not just for flickr, it works on facebook, yahoo, picassa, bebo, myspace, and much more.

I was using Firefox 2.0.0.12 on XP, for those of you who like numbers. I did notice as I was installing the plugin that it said something like 'oh, um, Mac users click here', but I didn't investigate.

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