The recent discussion of book covers as interface components on the ngc4lib list provides an opportunity to mention PicLens, a utility that is has been creating a lot of interest recently.
According to its creators, CoolIris, PicLens provides an “immersive full-screen experience for viewing photos and videos”. It is available as a browser plugin, and there are also some other options. There are guidelines for webmasters who want their sites to be available for the PicLens experience.
I have used it for a while now and find it very convenient for moving quickly through groups of images. It has some nice other features, including a recently added ‘discover’ feature which allows you to search image sources on the web and display the results within the PicLens environment.
So, two notes about PicLens and book covers. First, I was interested to see this note from Mark Dahl a while ago:
Jeremy recently made a couple of our sites, Watzek New Additions and accessCeramics, PicLens compatible. The new additions browsing is pretty cool. It lets you scan through images of book jackets.
Basically, this requires search results to be in a format called media RSS. [synthesize-specialize-mobilize: PicLens]
Second, it is possible to search Amazon through the discover feature I mention above and the book covers are displayed as a result and again can be manipulated in the PicLens environment. Some details about each book are also visible.
Useful? I don’t know 😉 The Barbara Pym covers are pretty nice though …..
Note: although it is possible to search Amazon from within PicLens, Amazon itself does not appear to be enabled for users who have the PicLens addon installed.
