Cool Iris: Sleek. Fun. Amazing.

I stumbled upon Cool Iris when I was browsing some add-ons for Firefox. I was simply amazed at what Cool Iris did when I launched the program.

So what is Cool Iris? Simply put, Cool Iris is a fast and exciting way to browse photos, videos, and search the internet.

Well, I can do that now, very easily, you might be thinking. That’s exactly what I thought until I launched Cool Iris. I think Cool Iris is all about the experience. Once you open it up you’ll see a nice clean simple interface with several main features. I’ll explain each of them.

The 3D Wall: This is the heart of the program. Here you will see all of the results for what you are searching for. A combination of photos and videos will display in a beautiful 3D wall and you can use the scroll feature at the bottom to quickly fly through all of the results. Once you find what you are looking for you can click on the photo and view that specific article, video, photo or product in more detail.

Photos: View the full size photo. You’ll be able to share (email), mark it as a favorite, or go to the web page.

Videos: Play the video, share it, mark it as a favorite, or go to the web page.

Products: View details about the product including price and description, share it, mark as favorite, or go directly to that product’s listing on Amazon.com.

The Sidebar: As you can see in the picture, the sidebar has four main categories: Discover, Shopping, Favorites and My Computer.

Discover has many subcategories listed under it including News, Sports, TV Episodes, Comedy, and many more. Clicking on any one of these subcategories will fill the 3D wall with a plethora of content related to that category. See the most recent news happenings or catch up on the latest sports highlights. Each picture in the 3D wall will enlarge when you click on it to allow you to explore more details about it.

Shopping is one of the ways I think Cool Iris shines. If I want shop for something I can type in what I’m looking for and then fly through the 3D wall results, browsing a huge mix of products and pricing all supplied by Amazon.com. It’s like running down an enormous department store aisle with a vast amount of related products, all with their prices clearly visible. Stop and click on a product to view a few more details or keep looking. Once you find what you’re looking for, click the Go to Store button and you are brought right to Amazon where you can make your purchase through their secure website.

Favorites is where you would see a 3D wall filled with all of the content that you marked as favorite. You will need to signup and create an account with Cool Iris in order to use this feature.

My Computer instantly fills your 3D wall with all of the photos found on your computer. The great thing about this is that if you keep all of your photos in your My Documents folder, Cool Iris knows right where to look. And for those of us more sophisticated Mac users, it pulls photos right from your iPhoto library.

Examining the Search Bar: Once you click in the search bar you’ll notice a drop down list of options that you can choose to search. Popular sites like YouTube, Hulu, and Flickr will allow you to find results directly within their content. This is another way in which Cool Iris provides an experience much better than the original site does. For example with YouTube, I much prefer Cool Iris’s 3D wall to the search results I get back from YouTube. The bottom line is that Cool Iris provides a very quick, effective, and pleasing to the eye, list of results for whatever content you are searching for.

Can I use Cool Iris? Chances are yes. Cool Iris supports the three main browsers on both Mac and Windows machines. It even supports Firefox for Linux users.

Take it for a Spin: The best way to experience Cool Iris is to install it and try it out. The program is free and it is an incredible tool as well as being very fun to use. So check it out right now. CoolIris.com

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