Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Software, Freeware, Internet, Apple
Safari, meet Cover Flow
I'm not sure why eye candy gets such a bad reputation-- we all need a little beauty in our lives, and no UI designer should ever argue that a "cool!" factor is a bad thing to have, when you've already hit all the other bases. Cover Flow is a perfect example. When people made their wishlists before iTunes 7, I don't know anyone that said they wanted a visual way to browse their albums. But everyone loved the Cover Flow plugin, and now those designers are working for Apple.So Jimmy G has an idea: why not add Cover Flow functionality into Safari? You could browse updated versions of your bookmarks just like you browse your albums in iTunes. I'm not sure I'd implement it exactly the way he has (click the pic above to see a bigger version), as if I'm browsing my web visually, I'd rather more real estate was given to the pages themselves. But it's an interesting idea.
And I think we could use a little more color in the web browsing experience-- the space between the browser tabs, if you will. If you're a Firefox for Windows user you really should try out the Tab Effect**; it lets you flip between tabs like a rotating cube. It's actually a little much to use all the time, but it's a cool idea, at least. And the PicLens plugin for Safari also puts a little oomph in your picture browsing-- it can create slideshows of Flickr pictures with just a click. You may think it's superfluous (and yes, if your app doesn't function already, it is) but we all need a little bit of eye candy now and again.
Thanks, Jimmy!
**Whoops. As commenter Rae notices, Tab Effect is Windows only, because it requires Directx 8. But it's still a cool effect.
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
cookiebrownie44 said 4:18PM on 7-28-2007
Awsome idea! Leopard needs it!
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Rae Whitlock said 5:23PM on 7-28-2007
Isn't Tab Effect dependent on DirectX 8? (ie: Windows-only)
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macsterdam said 5:27PM on 7-28-2007
Great idea, but something somewhat similar is already available ofr your history: http://www.smileonmymac.com/browseback/index.html
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Shreedhan said 5:50PM on 7-28-2007
Urgh, overkill me thinks, not necessary at all!
P.S. How come I can't put my website to link to my name in comments anymore?
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Buckeye77 said 3:00PM on 8-07-2007
I installed cover flow way before Apple bought them and i loved it, but i had no idea how many uses it actually would work for. I would love to see cover flow in Safari especially if the pages had real time refreshes so you could look over at the next page and actually see that it had changed and then click on it.
Cover Flow is such a better way to browse than windows or tabs.
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ratiosans said 6:01PM on 7-28-2007
the problem with the current desktop-based Cover Flow is that the only two ways to navigate it are 1) finding the scrollbar, which is black-on-black (hence nearly invisible) and dragging at lightspeed through your library, or 2) clicking an album currently visible on the sides and having it jump to the center spot. SmartScroll X is a plug-in for Safari which allows grab-and-drag navigation that is intuitive and highly usable. and the flavor of Cover Flow implemented in the iPhone allows a more tactile and SmartScroll-style grab-and-drag.
i would think that as Apple updates Cover Flow for the OS and later versions of iTunes, grab-and-drag functionality will find its way in, making the environment exponentially more friendly, effective, and adoptable by those who have previously thought of it as mere eye-candy.
lonelysandwich
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Matthew E said 6:40PM on 7-28-2007
I concur with #4. As to browsing 'updated versions of your bookmarks', seems to me RSS is already a much better solution overall for tracking changes to regularly visited sites without using the resources (memory, cpu, bandwidth) to actually render each full site individually multiple times. What I would rather have is a more innovative, elegant way to handle RSS feeds within Safari.
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Steve Grenier said 6:41PM on 7-28-2007
Oh man, I hope I'm not the only one here, but man do I hate Apple putting coverflow EVERYWHERE, I don't need it in Finder, I don't need it in Safari. I don't need it anywhere other than iTunes and even then its not very useful. On an iPod it is really amazing, but implementing it everywhere is so useless. I won't ever use it in Finder let alone if it were in Safari.
I think its a terrible idea.
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Justin R said 6:44PM on 7-28-2007
I think iTunes is bloated enough without coverflow, but then to say that everything should hav ecoverflow is crazy. Coverflow for finder is like organizing all of your icons into one row, making the icons the largest size they can be, all the while somehow taking up more memory when you can just look at at normally. It's pretty, but its not practical. With a 55gig iTunes library, things move slow enough as it is.
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umijin said 9:32PM on 7-28-2007
Puh-leeze! Less fluff and more stuff!
Leopard previews suggest Apple wants to iTunify the OS. We don't need that. We need better functionality without all this nonsense.
Apple should concentrate more on its portable hardware (now overweight and not energy efficient) than adding goofy flipping photos to its OS interface.
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Buckeye77 said 1:46AM on 7-29-2007
just like we all got use to columns , i think that cover flow view should be an OPTION, not a mandate. I honestly think it would work well for me based on how i use safari with multiple tabs - some for work and some for surfing. It certainly doesn't have to be the default in safari, but i love the option.
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Chris said 5:02AM on 7-29-2007
Coverflow is optional on all uses, so what? Don't like it, don't use it! I like it and I want to have it nearly everywhere, so that's a cool idea! Apple do this please!
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jp said 12:01AM on 7-30-2007
I wish I could browse through my cable tv channels with Cover Flow. Maybe Apple TV could be turned into a cable tuner--not far-fetched in light of the new federal cable tv laws that recently went into effect.
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arygaetu said 8:21AM on 7-30-2007
http://g.shiira.jp/groups/board_show/561
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Jon Williams said 10:58AM on 7-30-2007
This reminds me of the Nokia series60 browser's (WebKit based!) history feature.
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buzweaver said 11:13AM on 7-30-2007
How about something a little more practical, you know, SORTING capability. What self respecting browser doesn't have a sorting (Ascending/Descending) capability?
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HairyPotter said 6:48PM on 7-30-2007
I had almost this idea when I saw coverflow applied to finder the first time, but my idea is to have coverflow show the actual opened pages instead of bookmarks....
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