Cool Iris as a presentation tool
I admit it: I love Cool Iris. It’s just so elegant and beautiful.
If you’re unfamiliar with Cool Iris, it’s a browser plugin that currently works with Firefox (Windows XP/Vista, Mac, and Linux), Internet Explorer, Safari (Mac) and Flock. It allows you to preview images and video on an “infinite wall” and then enlarge any that catch your eye. The interface is an approximation of scrolling through items on an iPhone. A key benefit is the speed with which you can sort through a large quantity of images and enlarge specific images—much faster, for example, than clicking through sequential photo pages on Flickr.
Web sites have to be enabled to work with Cool Iris (examples of enabled sites are Flickr, Hulu, Facebook, Google Images, YouTube), but you can also use Cool Iris to view images on your own computer.
As enamored as I am with the interface, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that one might use it as a presentation tool…until I followed a link from Chris Lott’s blog to the Open Ed Conference presentation by Alan Levine. What a great idea! This could be useful in either my digital photography class or my desktop publishing class when I’m lecturing on elements of design or composition. Besides being significantly faster than the media tools I normally use for presentation, it will let me easily jump from image to image rather than (only) viewing them sequentially. I’m excited to give it a try!