The Cooliris plugin for Firefox is a fun media browser for sites such as flickr and google images. I have been curious if there might be a more effective use of this tool for architects specifically. My first thought was this might be an attractive powerpoint substitute to browse around the content live in a presentation, but this might end up being more confusing than useful. Then, it recently occured to me to try using this tool as a clean and simple viewer for zooming around a lengthy set of working drawings. It appears to work quite well. Here are more instructions. Give it a try and let me know what you think in the comments.
Step 1: Download and Install Firefox.
Step 2: Download and Install the Cooliris plugin for Firefox.
Step 3: Create JPEG files of your drawing set.
We’re using Autodesk Revit 2010 for drawing production, which makes exporting each sheet to JPEG pretty easy. Exporting at 2000 horizontal pixels seems to work well for medium detail viewing. If you’re using another process, check for built in image exporting utilities. If that’s not available, print a PDF set of drawings and then save the PDF as JPG from within Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Step 4: Create a photo gallery of your drawing set.
Either create a local folder with all your JPG files, or create an online photo gallery at one of the Cooliris supported photo sites: Picasa, Flickr, etc. Unless you’re legally okay with posting your drawings to an image hosting site, it’s probably best to stick with the local drive viewer available in the upper left of Cooliris. Name the files numerically as they should appear in your drawing set. Add enough zero’s to keep the whole set in order. For example, name files A-001, not A-1. Remember the cooliris button (shown below) activates a page in the 3D viewer. Here is a sample drawing uploaded to view using Cooliris.
Step 5: Present or Review your drawing set
Activate fullscreen viewing in Cooliris and now you’ve got a clear drawing viewing tool that may have it’s place amongst certain presentations or internal document reviews. I’m interested in trying this out with our office’s Smartboard touch screen. We should be able to then use the smartboard built in mark up tools in combination with Snagit to seamlessly grab markup screenshots of notes made while reviewing drawings.
