The three headliners for this 1.7 release are a new “discovery” mode for finding cool content you didn’t know about, an Amazon search feature, where you can search and browse photos of Amazon products, and a “return to PicLens” button that takes you from the browser back to what you were last looking at in PicLens.

Discovery mode is a feed aggregator – it pulls together content from all over the web into categories like news, sports, entertainment, and so forth. For those of you who love PicLens but were having trouble finding stuff to look at, Discovery is for you. ;>

The Amazon search & browse is pretty much what it sounds like.  You can enter a search term and see results returned from the Amazon store.  Click on an item and you go directly to the Amazon product page where you can purchase it or see reviewer’s comments, etc.  (I wonder who gets the affiliate fee for sending you to Amazon?  Hmmm…)

 Return to Piclens is my baby – the last Piclens feature I worked on at Cooliris.  When you click on the attribution link of an item in PicLens (the little blue globe in the caption bar of the selected item), PicLens opens the original web page containing that item in the web browser, and PicLens closes its full-screen display. 

When your curiousity about that item has been sated, how do you go back to what you were looking at in PicLens?  Prior to the 1.7 release, you had to fire up a new PicLens session, reconstruct the search query you used last, and then scroll back to where you were before you hopped out to the browser.

Now in Piclens 1.7, when you click on an attribution link to view a page in the browser, PicLens displays a translucent “Return to Piclens” button in the bottom right corner of the screen.  When you’re ready to go back to PicLens, just click that button and the PicLens full screen display returns, showing exactly where you left off.  You can even navigate around in the browser (click on links, view different pages) before returning to PicLens.

I think Return to Piclens is only implemented in the Windows versions of the PicLens plugins (IE and Firefox) - for the moment.  The Mac guys were busy with another project while I was working on this, but they’ll get this return button implemented on the Mac side of the house soon I’m sure. 

There’s also a navigation helper in PicLens itself that appears at the top of the display when you start a new PicLens session instead of using the Return to Piclens button.  This is another handy way to go back to the site or search query you were last looking at in PicLens.

Congrats to the PicLens team!  Can’t wait to see the next round of stuff.  :>

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Just one thing:  Web site authors, please be careful how you link to the PicLens downloads.  PicLens supports a wide variety of browsers and operating systems, and different downloads are required for each.  Please don’t link directly to a specific file on piclens.com.  That link will break when the next build of piclens is released (with a different file name), and it won’t be the correct link for all the different kinds of browsers and operating systems that your web site visitors use.

To provide a link for your web site users to download the PicLens browser plugin, just link to http://www.piclens.com.  Our web site autodetects the browser and OS of the visitor so that when the user clicks on “download”, we can send them the right file for their system.

Thanks!

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 Note that if you do a search for PicLens on CNET, you’ll get two items in the search results:  The first one is PicLens 1.0 beta for Mac Safari, circa 2006.  You want the second one, version 1.6.1 (or later!).  We’ll work on getting that ancient 1.0 beta file replaced with at least the current PicLens 1.5 for Safari.

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Very cool, Mark!

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Great work, Marcus!

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