thumbnails posts

Filed under: Photo, Yahoo!, Social Software

Flickr's search function gets a facelift

by Jay Hathaway Aug 5th 2009

Delicious isn't the only Yahoo-owned service to get a makeover this week. Flickr also added some new search features, which should make it easier to browse the site and find what you're looking for. The layout of search results has changed, giving users the ability to resize thumbnails and click for more info without opening a photo page. The results also automatically resize to fit your browser window, which is good news for users with extremely large or extremely small displays.

There's also a new sidebar, displaying related groups, photographers, tag clusters and places. My new favorite addition, although it may seem like a small thing, is that Flickr now actually tells you which search results it's showing you. Refining searches under the old system wasn't very transparent, but now you know whether you're in someone's photostream or searching all of Flickr, whether you're searching for Creative Commons images or not, and more. All in all, the new search page is a big win for usability.

Tags: flickr, photo, photos, search, thumbnails

Filed under: Internet, Mozilla, Freeware, Browsers

Thumbstrips adds visual browsing history to your Firefox

by Lee Mathews Nov 24th 2008

Though not as well-known as Microsoft's Office Labs, Intuit has a similar endeavor of their own. One of its slickest apps is Thumbstrips, a Firefox addon that records your browsing history as thumbnails.

It's currently featured in the Digital Pack Rat assortment on Fashion Your Firefox, and for good reason. Thumbstrips' snapshots make locating previously viewed pages much easier. Apart from the thumbnail, the site's domain name and the approximate time it's been since your visit are also displayed.

Now that I've shown my four-year-old son how to click the little overlapping box icon to show and hide it, it's cut down drastically on questions like "Daddy, how to I get my Scooby game back?" A less frustrating browsing experience for my family members is always a welcome change.

My only complaint about Thumbstrips is its limited customization. I want to be able to display the strip on the left or right side of my display: 1280x800 gives plenty of width, but not so much height. Still, it's a definite improvement over a text-only history listing and worth the install.

If you've used thumbstrips, share your thoughts! If you're using something similar, we'd like to hear about that, too!

Tags: addons, extension, firefox, history, thumbnails

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Freeware

Pin minimized windows to desktop thumbnails with miniMIZE

by Lee Mathews Nov 17th 2008

I'm always on the lookout for a good application to utilize the extra space on my widescreen monitor, and this morning I happened upon miniMIZE.

It's a free app for Windows that monitors the applications you launch. When you minimize a window, miniMIZE removes the button from your taskbar and creates a thumbnail. It's easy on system resources, only consuming about 7mb of memory.

Thumbnails can be dragged anywhere on your desktop, or you can let miniMIZE automatically line them up along any edge of your desktop. You can also choose to pin icons to the desktop or have them float on top of active windows.

Further tweaks include thumbnail size, opacity, customizable hotkeys, and application icon overlays. Any applications you don't want handled by miniMIZE can be added to an exclusions list - just drag the crosshairs onto the appropriate program.

It's similar to ThumbWin, which Brad wrote about last year, but the site and application are both English.

Note that miniMIZE will only catch things after it's running - so you'll have to close and re-open your other apps after installing it for things to take effect.

Tags: desktop, enhancement, minimize, thumbnails

Filed under: Design, Photo, Utilities

Blow up those thumbnails the fancy way with FancyZoom

by Jay Hathaway Aug 2nd 2008

If your site uses thumbnail images, but you're still opening a separate tab or a separate window to show the larger version, you need to see this: FancyZoom is a little bit of Javascript used by Cabel Sasser on both his personal site and the Panic website, to zoom images inline. Cabel describes the effect as "Mac-like," which is about as accurate a description as you can get. It feels like it should be part of Safari, but it works just fine in other browsers, too.

FancyZoom is a more compact alternative to other zooming effects you might be familiar with, like Lightbox or That Thing Apple Uses on Apple.com. It can be added to a site using only 2 lines of HTML, and it doesn't require any additional libraries. You can also use FancyZoom on a text link to an image, instead of a thumbnail, which could definitely come in handy for some blog layouts we've seen.

[via JoshSpear]

Tags: cabel sasser, CabelSasser, FancyZoom, images, Javascript, Panic, thumbnails, zoom

Scalable Fabric Gives Your Windows Some Perspective

by Lee Mathews Jul 17th 2008

If you've got a mammoth widescreen monitor on your desk and you're a Windows user, you may be wondering what to do with all the extra real estate you've got. Why not use it to visually manage your running applications?

Microsoft Scalable Fabric takes your monitor periphery and turns it into a tumbnail gallery of your non-active windows. After installing the app (which requires the .Net 1.1 framework), the middle of your desktop becomes a hot zone. It's totally customizable, so you can stretch the boundary lines as far to the edges as you like to prevent accidental resizing.

Drag a window out of the zone, and it will shrink, getting smaller as you drag it farther away from the boundary line. Drag it back, and it returns to its restore size. It's even smart enough to remember the position you drag your windows to - click a taskbar button to minimize, and it'll shrink back to it's thumbnailed home.

Oh yeah, there's a little more eye candy inside: minimize and maximizing are animated, albeit somewhat poorly. It's a good way for anyone who heavily multitasks to keep their arsenal of applications at the ready.

Tags: customize, desktop, manage, thumbnails, window manager, WindowManager, windows

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

ThumbWin: Minimize open windows to thumbnails

by Brad Linder Oct 31st 2007

When you hit the minimize tab on any program in Windows, your application will disappear into the taskbar. But if you've got more than a few applications hiding out in your taskbar, it can be kind of tough to find the program you're looking for.

ThumbWin gives your minimized windows a bit more visual information. Once you install and run this tiny application, any time you minimize a window, a thumbnail will be created on your desktop. You can click the thumbnail to maximize a window, or click the close button on a thumbnail to exit a program.

ThumbWin only kicks in if you minimize applications one at a time. If you hit the show desktop button, no thumbnails will be created. The utility is highly customizable, letting you change the thumbnail dimensions and layout. You can also select certain programs to exclude from ThumbWin, which will prevent thumbnails from being generated when you minimize those applications.

[via CyberNet]

Tags: minimize, thumbnails, ThumbWin

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Search

Exalead search engine shows website thumbnail previews

by Brad Linder Sep 22nd 2007

Ever wish Google would let you see what a website looks like before you click a search result? Yeah, neither did we. But Exalead has solved a problem that may or may not exist by putting thumbnail previews of websites next to search results.

Overall, the search engine performs reasonably well. There's a nice "related term" feature that lets you narrow your search results. And you can search the full web or just blogs. But the way we see it, there's two problems:

The thumbnails are far too small to really tell you anything. If you're searching for a product, you might have enough info to determine if you're looking at a web store or review site. But you might not. And for more esoteric searches, good luck.
The site includes 2-3 sponsored results at the top of the page. That would be fine for text results, but with images, your browser window can easily show 3 sponsored items and just one genuine, unbiased (we hope) search result. If you have to scroll down to get to the good stuff, people are just going to choose a different search engine.

In other words, the pictures aren't big enough to be useful, and they may also be too big to provide you all the information you want at a glance. The simplest solution would probably be to use fewer paid links, or to make the images for sponsored results a bit smaller.

The search engine does let you turn off the image preview, but if you do that, there's really not much reason to use Exalead over competing products.

Exalead will demonstrate its search engine at the DEMO conference next week.

[via Silicon Alley Insider]

Tags: demo, exalead, images, search-engine, thumbnails

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software

Reddit Media: what Reddit would look like with an image section

by Brad Linder Aug 22nd 2007

Some of the most popular links on Digg, Reddit, and other social news sites are funny or interesting pictures. But you have to read through a lot of text to find them. Niether Digg nor Reddit have tools to display photo or video thumbnails. They're sort of the Craigslists of social media.

Reddit Media is an interesting take on what Reddit would look like with image thumbnails. The site is unaffiliated with Reddit (and thus it could be just a matter of time before Conde Nast shuts it down). But it has a look and interface that's quite similar to Reddit. The only difference is that Reddit Media scans Reddit for posts with images and puts a thumnbnail next to the headline.

Perhaps if the site gains enough traction, Reddit will decide to copy it and not just shut it down.

Tags: digg, images, reddit, reddit media, RedditMedia, thumbnails

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Palm, Web services, Yahoo!, Social Software, Unix

del.icio.us improvements - homepage thumbnails, tag UI, hints at more

by David Chartier Aug 17th 2006

del.icio.us is at it again, and this time they've added site thumbnails to the popular links on the homepage. Unfortunately, this is the only place thumbnails exist, but it's at least a step towards catching up to some of their competitors in this particular department.

Also making (another) appearance on the homepage is the re-introduction of popular tags, along with (from what I remember) some minor new UI elements as well. Bookmark counts are now in a more striking blue box, and I just noticed the tag cloud now uses red to denote tags that you share with everyone else (is this new or not?). Finally, on their blog they also hint at "lots of plans" for the recently updated del.icio.us API, but they offer nothing as hints towards whether it'll be a kitchen sink or a bookmarking A.I. that 'marks things for me based on my mood and past bookmarks. I guess we'll just have to wait (im)patiently.

Tags: color, colors, del.icio.us, delicious, features, homepage, redesign, tags, thumbnails, UI, update, updates

Filed under: Internet, Freeware

Opera 9 gets tab thumbnails and widgets

by Jordan Running Feb 2nd 2006

This is pretty intriguing. Opera Watch has obtained some "exclusive" screenshots of some new features rumored to be in the upcoming Opera 9. First is tab thumbnails: when you hover your mouse over a tab in Opera 9, a thumbnail image of the page on that tab is displayed along with information like title and URL. It's a behavior similar to Tab Preview, a Firefox extension I mentioned a few months back. Second is widgets. Yes, widgets. Unfortunately we have pretty much zero details except that the'll be "small programs that use Opera's rendering engine," and the screenshot shows nothing but a "Show widgets" menu item. Opera Watch speculates that widgets might be Opera's answer to Firefox's extensions, which Opera's CEO might have been hinting at in a Slashdot interview last month.

[Via Digg]

Tags: opera, tabs, thumbnails, widgets

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