Cooliris

» see cooliris.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

cooliris started in 2006 in palo alto as a small team building a plugin called piclens. the demo was the entire pitch. you installed the extension and clicked a little arrow icon on any thumbnail in google image search or flickr. the page disappeared and your screen filled with a long wall of images stretching off into a vanishing point, drifting on a track. you scrolled and the wall scrolled with you. it was unlike anything else a browser could do at the time, and the technical answer was simple. flash.

the public release of piclens landed in january 2008. the new york times called it a new immersive approach to web navigation. it won the 2008 crunchies award for best design. the rebrand to cooliris came soon after, and by 2010 the plugin had fifty million downloads across firefox and internet explorer. google contracted the team to build the android gallery app, which shipped on more than forty million phones.

cooliris showed up on my firefox install around 2008, like a lot of the firefox extensions that era encouraged you to try. the 3D wall was thrilling for about a week, the way a screensaver is thrilling for about a week. then it sat in the extension list as a thing i never opened. i was on ttnet adsl at the time and the plugin warmed the laptop fan in a way that made closing it the obvious move.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the 3D wall ~

what cooliris actually built was an oversized media viewer with momentum scrolling and a smart prefetcher. the 3D wall pulled image urls from whatever page you triggered it on, loaded the full-resolution versions in the background, and laid them out in a tiled plane your cursor could shove around. for image-heavy sites this was a real improvement on clicking thumbnails one at a time. for everyone else it was a parlor trick. the company kept pivoting toward photo apps for ipad and iphone because the parlor trick on its own did not pay the rent.

~ the brand quietly leaving ~

by may 2014 the official site no longer offered the desktop plugin download. the iphone and ipad apps were the only products left, and even those did not feel like a future. on 21 november 2014 yahoo acquired the team, which everyone read correctly as an acquihire for the people, not the product. the cooliris brand disappeared into yahoo and never came back out. the cooliris.com domain was listed for sale years later.

~ what remains ~

cooliris left two things behind. the more famous is the android gallery app the team built under contract, which shipped on a generation of android phones and became the default photo viewer for tens of millions of people who never knew where it came from. the smaller inheritance is the visual idea of an infinite scrollable wall of media as a navigation primitive, which lives on in pinterest and in every google photos timeline. cooliris was the prototype. flash killed it before pinterest figured out how to do the same thing with html.

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