Cooliris, Inc. is an American corporation. Headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, Cooliris develops a range of products focused on enhancing the user experience for online media. The company, at present, offers two freeware applications: Cooliris and CoolPreviews.
Products
CoolPreviews, formerly known as Cooliris Previews, is a web browser plugin for Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Flock that opens a preview of the underlying content of a web link when the mouse hovers over the link. The stated goal of the software is to optimize browsing by allowing review of multiple links while preserving the context of the originating page. For example, one could preview a list of news headlines before deciding which article to read in depth.
Cooliris, formerly known as PicLens, is a web browser plugin that provides interactive full-screen slideshows of online images. The plugin is available for Safari, Firefox, and Internet Explorer. At present, the software is compatible with Google Image Search, Yahoo! Image Search, Ask.com Images, Live Search Images, AOL Image Search, Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa, Fotki, FotoTime, deviantART, SmugMug, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, hi5, Friendster, YouTube (for videos), and any web site that implements mediaRSS <link> tags in their HTML pages. The software places a small icon in the corner of an image thumbnail when the mouse moves over it, which launches into a full-screen photo viewer when clicked, but without giving an option to save any of the pictures shown.
History
Cooliris, Inc. was founded in January, 2006, and later launched Cooliris Previews (later renamed CoolPreviews) for Firefox, followed by versions for Internet Explorer and Safari. In May, 2006, the company released Coolringer, and introduced PicLens (later renamed Cooliris) in October, 2006.
Early versions of Cooliris Previews displayed the contents of a link in image form, which limited the user's ability to explore the contents of the page. The product was subsequently updated to make the preview fully interactive, improving performance and usability.
Cooliris, Inc. received funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers[1] in July 2007[2].
Server side vs. client side
Of note is that the CoolPreviews software is client-side, whereas some other products, e.g. Snap, are server-side. There are advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Namely, client-side software must first be downloaded, and must be developed specifically for each browser platform; however, once installed, it can offer functionality exceeding the constraints of HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. In contrast, server-side software can be deployed by web site administrators without user intervention, removing a barrier to adoption; however, it is subject to the aforementioned constraints and each site owner must implement it for the user to benefit.
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