Three months ago I posted thread titled ' Web Design' detailing an interesting site Uniqlo had put up displaying data in a very unique manner for a website. It seems Uniqlo were not the only ones thinking outside the box as a company by the name of Cooliris has released a plugin for Firefox that completely re-writes the static and mundane way people view image and video sites.



What is more, their technology is embedable in other websites. This allows users to use this app without having to download the plugin. One site I have come accross using this method is CoolFlick (a combination of Cooliris and Flickr). I recommend taking a look at CoolFlick first. Once loaded, just click and drag to move left and right. Alternatively, click and flick or throw the image pane left and right.

The plugin also supports Deviant Art, Youtube, Facebook and Google Images among many others. Here's hoping that there will be an offline version to view my image collections in this manner. It's great to see that people understand the current way we view information is both time consuming and cumbersome. I hope to see such initiative in other areas of computing and information systems.

P.S. Where's the 'Preview Post' button?

EDIT: It should be noted that a decent internet connection is needed to view this properly. Reason being there are no 'webpages' just a single 'wall' in which all images from a search are viewed. Fortunately, it loads the images chronologically. So it loads what you can see first, then the rest in sequence.

No offence but isn't it just like a flash website, since it's not the whole website that's 3D but only a part of it, it's just like slapping a big picture over a small one.

And three months ago I typed something that applies to this site too. :)
This time it's a viewer for a mess of random images.
But I do like the interface.

It looks cool to me. It does just seem like it would be hard to view sites and stuff with it...

I don't see what is so special about this they are just using flash player. The next new thing is going to be CSS animation to draw away from the dependency on flash player. So instead of static websites like you put it we may soon start to see more advanced UI website designs. While possible with flash it takes a heavy toll on bandwidth and sometimes a hell of a long time to load. But with CSS animation it would be more instantaneous and a lot more practical.

I agree with bwilhelm. We really need to get rid of Flash animations. CSS animation is still far away, but you can do amazing things with Ajax and Java programming. Especially ajax is pretty impressive and doesn't require any 3rd party software/plugins. Many blogs have these animated 'tagclouds', which imo is a great example of Web 3.0 browsing.

I've seen a couple of those tag clouds (those 3d-ish kinds). Those use flash as well. Is there an example of one that doesn't use flash?

Personally I don't hope too hard that flash will go away. Even though I think that flash is rarely used in a useful manner.

There is one hidden blessing with flash. It acts as a ghetto for annoying advertising and bad web design. You want to get rid of annoying advertising? Use flashblock and that gets rid of 99% of annoying advertising on websites. I hope it takes awhile before advertisers realize that pulsing is the new blink.. Or else I will have to find a browser that allows me to block CSS animations. :P

Seriously though we don't know for sure if CSS animations will become part of the standard spec. Some folks say that this kind of behavior should be javascript only.

BTW you'll need either: Safari 4 beta, Mobile Safari, or the latest webkit nightly to view the above link as CSS animations is currently a webkit only thing