Impressive

A view to kill for

A really nice piece of web kit has just caught my usually very cynical attention. It’s called PicLens and is a very simple to install extension for browser of choice, Firefox.

Simply put, it’s a reinvented picture search engine that piggybacks on your usual image sites such as google, flickr and deviant. It has a lovely, easy to use, immersive and animated interface – But somehow still manages to deliver the speed aspect so often overlooked by developers. It feels faster than raw html and how can that be? I haven’t dug down into what platform it uses or whether it is accessible to 100% of all users, but I really don’t care – It works reeeeaaally well for me, and I’m the most difficult digital consumer I know. This is going to make searching for non-stock imagery so much more fun and pleasant.

I suppose my only gripe at the moment is that you cannot just click and drag images into a lightbox or file saving device. You are also not able to ‘rightmouseclick’ on an image and save directly from the interface; You have to launch a window back into Firefox to get that functionality back again. I imagine it’s to stop people easily nicking images, however, I don’t see how that’s conducive to the open source nature of the web today.

It also does not currently carry any advertising and a small gremlin inside me whispers in my ear – They’ll wait till they have a million+ users before they bombard you with car insurance ads. But let me stop right there, this is a positive blog article – The world is a lovely place and this product rocks. I urge you to install it.