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July 31, 2008 2:47 PM PDT

PicLens adds YouTube, Amazon

by Seth Rosenblatt
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The fun browser add-on PicLens has incorporated YouTube and Amazon.com into the short but hopefully soon-to-grow list of supported Web sites. Compatible with Firefox on Windows and Mac, Internet Explorer, and Safari, PicLens recreates your surfing experience with a futuristic graphical display.

PicLens now supports searches on YouTube and Amazon.com.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

As Rafe talked about in February, PicLens highlights the image content of a site and allows you to whip back and forth using mouse gestures instead of conventional static browsing. If you're familiar with how it works with an image site like Flickr, the YouTube interface is identical. The PicLens plug-in will install a grid button on your Toolbar, which you click to activate the PicLens full-screen interface. Click a thumbnail to start playing a video, while the search box lives in the upper right of your screen. As video starts playing, standard YouTube controls appear at the bottom of the video. One potential drawback is that if the quality of the video is low, then the not-quite-full-screen playback will probably appear pixelated.

On Amazon, the experience is slightly different. The main Amazon.com page doesn't support the PicLens button, but if you click on the button anyway it will open up the PicLens UI. From there, change the Web site search to Amazon, type in your search term, and images of whatever item you searched for will zoom past. The Amazon interface responded slower than other, more heavily-image based Web sites like Picasa.

PicLens currently supports YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace, Fotobucket, deviantART, Google Images, Yahoo Images, and about a half-dozen others. The slideshow mode makes PicLens more accessible for users who are worried about the vertiginous effects of the add-on. There's also a plug-in for WordPress users to add the feature to their site, and instructions for any webmaster to add PicLens support to their self-hosted pages.

Originally posted at The Download Blog
Seth peers into the deep, dark corners of software so that you don't have to. He has yet to suffer a single nightmare about OS/2. You can follow him on Twitter.
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by eclipse7500 July 31, 2008 4:58 PM PDT
Sorry but this is news from around a month ago, why is it posted now?
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by blogdork August 2, 2008 1:58 PM PDT
eclipse is right, this review was here before and was plagued with negative comments about it. Is CNET watching our backs here?
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by Lapinou August 5, 2008 11:43 PM PDT
it is an excellent plugin, if you want to publish your own photos on a web site and visible with piclens, you can use http://www.photoonweb.com which added the support for Piclens
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by cse_riyadh August 6, 2008 1:51 AM PDT
ddfs
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by kevinlakin August 6, 2008 4:23 AM PDT
I have been raving about Piclens to all my friends for months and months, i even e-mailed the peeps at PicLens to tell them what a brilliant job they were doing, this a fantastic bit of kit,
and its free.
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by khalid120/9l August 12, 2008 4:49 AM PDT
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by talat777 August 18, 2008 9:44 PM PDT
have a nice day.
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