loadUniversalPlayer({playerTitle: '',lumiereQueryType: 'id',lumiereQueryValue: '50003490',useCurrentPageUrl: true,relatedVideo: false,preRollAd: true,wrapperFloat:'left'});

Cooliris for Firefox (formerly PicLens) is an add-on for Firefox which makes viewing images much more elegant and fun. Once installed, you can simply perform a search for images at a Cooliris-enabled site--like Google, Flikr, or Amazon--to bring up a full-screen 3D wall of results. Grab the bar at the bottom to watch your wall of results scroll by smoothly on your screen. When you find an image or movie you like click on it to get a larger view. Cooliris also lets you search from within the interface by category or by site with its Discovery tools.

For more info about Cooliris for Firefox check out this First Look video.

Dear users,

Over the past months, we’ve been hard at work redesigning our site. You may have got a sneak peak at our new look and feel or you may be seeing it for the first time today. Either way, we hope that you enjoy the smoother, sleeker, and easier-to-navigate pages.

Wondering what, exactly, has changed? Here’s a brief tour:

Easier-to-find content: We’ve reexamined our site layout to make it easier to find the software that matters to you. We’ve moved our Most Popular software lists front-and-center so that you can see which titles currently top our charts. We’ve also designed tabs with your operating system in mind, so you won’t have to wade through software that you don’t need.

Faster page load time: Our engineers put the site on a diet. The result? Much quicker load times for each page.

New video player: We still put a video player on many of our pages, but this one looks nicer. It plays in wide screen (16:9 aspect ratio) and makes its many features–closed captioning, full-screen mode, and links to download or embed any of our videos–easier to find and use.

Better search results: Our Download.com search now returns blog posts and videos along with software titles. Also, if you like, you can customize the number of search results you get with each query.

We don’t want to fix what isn’t broken, however. The backbone of Download.com remains the same: more than 100,000 downloads, all guaranteed spyware-free.

Like what you see? Frustrated by the change? We want to know what you think, so please send us feedback.

Best,

The CNET Download.com team

With the latest versions of Adobe Photoshop and Premiere Elements, Adobe's laying on the Web subscription message really thick. Take, for instance, the Welcome screen, which is your first encounter with either one of the applications. The standard Organize, Edit, Create and Share options get relegated to a task bar that's relatively inconspicuous compared to the large, rotating slide show heralding the many benefits of the free and $40 Plus memberships for photoshop.com (more project templates, remote backup and 20GB-plus of storage space). Adobe might as well have sold the space as an ad; it's that annoying. (For more on the online and mobile aspects of the Elements release, read our coverage on Download.com.) And that's too bad, because Photoshop Elements remains a very nice midrange photo editor, but all of these bells and whistles--some pretty off-key--increasingly detract from its core strengths.

The program's main advantage is that it's cheaper than Photoshop and Lightroom, but remains powerful enough for most photo retouching tasks. Thus, the improved raw workflow is quite welcome--improved, in that you can bypass it entirely if you want. For example, to create a slide show of NEF (Nikon raw) files, it simply applies the default raw-processing settings and treats them like JPEGs.

Also quite useful is the new text search box in the organizer, which is a fast, easy way to filter by keywords or basic metadata. Very basic metadata; you can only search on time, data, camera and caption text. But that should be sufficient for this class of user.

Of course, there has to be at least one whizzy feature per version, and this one has the Photomerge Scene Cleaner, an extension of Group Shot. It allows you to seamlessly combine variations of a photo to eliminate unwanted objects in the scene. Features like this never work for me immediately; this one did, on two random photos (which met the similarity criteria). I haven't tried the other variations, Photomerge Faces or Panorama--but those are derivative of existing Photoshop CS3 tools.

Adobe has also streamlined adjustment operations with Smart Brushes, which consolidate multi-operation adjustments, such as selecting then creating a new effects layer, into a single selection operation that automatically generates the layer and mask.

For a more complete tour of the product's new features, click through the slide show.

However, I can't get around how confusing the user interface remains, in part because everything seems organized by technology, rather than by task. Before and after views are still only available in Quick Fix and Guided modes. A hodgepodge of stuff lives on the Guided palette, some of which you can't find elsewhere in the program, like the Photomerge tools, or which don't seem guiding at all, like the Saturated Slide Film effect or the Action Player. The latter runs scripts that request user input, which is why I suspect they're considered Guided, but in that respect they're no different than dialog boxes or Wizards. I just can't remember where to find things a lot of the time.

Unfortunately, these are the things that rarely change before the product ships. Stuff that I expect to improve are the performance (the beta is slow) and the selection of presets, Actions and templates (they're pretty thin). But I'll check back when it ships at the end of September and see if there are any pleasant surprises. Price is either $79.99 or $99.99, depending if you buy it via the Adobe store and/or believe in mail-in rebates. Add $40 for the Plus-membership option.

Adobe Systems on Monday let loose its plan to reinvent its image-editing software: the convergence of desktop, Webware, and mobile photo applications.

In late September, Adobe will update both Adobe's Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements with version 7, rebrand Photoshop Express as Photoshop.com, and debut a mobile Photoshop (of sorts) for Windows Mobile.

Syncing with the new Photoshop.com

Whereas Photoshop Express (review) began life as an experimental, Web-based offshoot of the Photoshop brand, Adobe's new strategy to automatically sync photos from desktop to Web to phone and back again now gives Photoshop Express a starring role on the Photoshop playbill, albeit using a different alias. Don't let that fool you--although the product will now be Photoshop.com, it will retain its editing features and the ability to post photos to Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa. The bigger difference is that the new Photoshop.com will sync with the two Photoshop Elements applications and the new mobile software.

To sweeten the deal for existing users, and perhaps to lure new ones, Adobe is bumping up the free, basic membership plan from 2GB to 5GB of storage. However, Adobe is no doubt hoping that users will get hooked on online storage and go with the Plus membership, which will dish out templates and tips in addition to serving up 20GB in locker space for photos and videos. The 'Plus' plan is sold on its own for $50 per year or bundled with the desktop software for $140.

New Photoshop Elements

Phase two of Adobe's photo-syncing project is to update the desktop-bound Elements applications to make them compatible with the new Photoshop.com. They'll get a few additional features and enhancements along the way. For instance, Photoshop Elements 7--which is expected to sell for about $100 or $80 if you're upgrading--will automatically back up photos online, deliver new templates, and will contain new image-enhancement tools. CNET Senior Editor Lori Grunin has an in-depth preview and her own take on Adobe's efforts to stay relevant.

Premiere Elements 7 will see the bonus features in Elements 7 and raise them with new movie-making tools, support for AVCHD, and automatic video upload to YouTube. Grunin weighs in on that update, too.

Photoshop on the phone

Adobe's mobile presence has so far been restricted to utilities--a mobile PDF-reader and Flash Lite for playing Flash videos on the mobile stage. To that end, Photoshop.com Mobile beta is Adobe's first attempt at creating a mobile version of one of its consumer offerings, although the app will primarily remain a vehicle for simple uploading and downloading to and from the revamped Photoshop.com.

Based on the Flash Lite Player, Photoshop.com Mobile beta will let you upload all the photos on your mobile phone to Photoshop.com, which will then automatically sync to either Element 7 app, if you have one. The preview build we saw is divided into three rudimentary actions. The first is to upload select phone photos to Photoshop.com for sharing with friends or for using as a backup. The second has you viewing thumbnails of all the photos in your online gallery, and the third lets you peruse any albums you've created on Photoshop.com and Elements 7. There will be no photo-tagging, titling, or captioning in the initial release, and we admit that's a letdown, especially when competing photo apps can already do this on multiple mobile operating systems.

That's a competition to which Adobe can't help but be attentive. Traditionally a publisher of desktop software, Adobe has been slow to adapt for the two fastest-growing software platforms--mobile and the Web. While we expect a bare bones Photoshop.com Mobile beta, the app's ability to connect with the Photoshop.com hub gives Adobe more relevance for existing users. We're skeptical that folks using Picasa, Photobucket, and Flickr will abandon them for Photoshop.com, but the ability to quickly post from the phone to those sites, from the Web to the desktop, and from the phone to the desktop via Adobe's servers, may keep users of the Elements desktop apps from bailing in favor of a competitor.

Like Adobe's other releases, Photoshop.com Mobile beta will be available in late September, first for Samsung Blackjack I and II, Moto Q 9h and 9m, and Palm Treo 700 w/wx and 750, with support for other Windows Mobile phones expected to follow.

As with its sibling Adobe Photoshop Elements, with Premiere Elements Adobe pushes the Web subscription message a little too hard. Take, for instance, the Welcome screen, which is your first encounter with either one of the applications. The InstantMovie, Open Project and New Project options get relegated to a task bar that's relatively inconspicuous compared to the large, rotating slide show heralding the many benefits of the free and $40 Plus membership for photoshop.com (more project templates, remote access and 20GB-plus of storage space). Adobe might as well have sold the space as an ad; it's that annoying. (For more on the online and mobile aspects of the Elements release, read our coverage on Download.com.)

This version really feels like an attempt to catch-up to competitors. It now includes AVCHD support, for which Adobe has lagged far behind its competitors for a long time. The good news is that it handled every AVCHD file format on my hard disk--from a variety of Canon, Sony and Panasonic camcorders--without problems.

Its new InstantMovie basically rolls selected clips into prefab templates. They're nice templates, and it does a good job. But when compared with innovations like Pinnacle Studio Plus 12's Montage themes, which allow for some really clever, sophisticated effects, and a friendly implementation for editing them, InstantMovie seems pretty basic and uninspiring. Ditto for its basic SmartSound music-generation implementation. Adobe licenses it like everyone else, but didn't even bother to give it a similar interface to the rest of Premiere.

Using technology from Adobe's Ultra, Premiere Elements now suports rudimentary chromakeying. On one hand, this Videomerge feature is dead simple to use. When you drag a video with a (relatively) solid-colored background into the timeline or onto another video, the program asks if you want to treat it as a Videomerge clip and automatically combines them with the background chromakeyed out. However, Adobe provides no controls for you to tweak the results. Even a simple color tolerance slider could have prevented the flag from showing through Dan Ackerman's skin here.

Granted, orange isn't your standard chromakey color, but in a consumer product, not everything that's shot is intentional. If the point was to find fun new ways of using the clips you have, the implementation just missed the boat.

The one interesting new capability is Smart Tag, which can automatically analyze your clips and keyword them based on video characteristics like blurred, shaky, high quality, in focus and so on. You can then, say, choose all the clips that are "high quality" and "in focus". Since it shares much of the organizer with Photoshop, you have access to all the same album and search features. Unfortunately, it can't display basic information such as video resolution without popping up the properties of each individual clip.

This beta was quite sluggish and unstable, at least on my system (which more than meets minimum requirements), but I'm assuming that will disappear by the time the product ships at the end of September ($99.99). I'll let you know, and give you an update on these first impressions.

Earlier Monday one of my colleagues from Gamespot spent most of lunch gushing to me about his new favorite GTD tool. Called Toodledo, it's diminutive name does not do its to-do list prowess justice--this is one of the most deep and full-featured offerings on the market. It's also one of the easiest to get into, especially if you're using other Web services like Google Calendar, Twitter, and Jott.

At its heart Toodledo is a task organizer, so two of the most important aspects should be entering in the data as well as being able to access it from all over the place. Luckily it does a great job on both counts. You can plug into your task list from all sorts of places including mobile phones, start pages like Netvibes and MyYahoo, Twitter, and on various widget engines like OS X's Dashboard and Vista's Sidebar. In any case the interface is pretty familiar: just a simple rundown of what you have to do and some empty boxes to check off whatever you've dealt with.

Two of Toodledo's most handy input methods are actually outside of its core Web service. Using speech-to-text service Jott you can simply call in and leave a to-do item. It will convert your call into one or more to-do items while managing to pull out any dates and times. Having used this with ReQall's iPhone application (coverage) it's just plain handy, albeit a minute killer if you're on a tight cellular plan.

The other method I like is the Firefox extension that lets you create and manage list items without having to use a separate application, or you keeping the site open in another tab. It also includes a contextual menu shortcut, so say you get an e-mail from a friend about their favorite wine, you can simply highlight the name, and right click to send it to your to-buy list. You can also do this with entire chunks of text and it will simply pull the dates and add the entire clipboard into the notes section of that item.

Also of note is the iPhone Web app, which made waves for being one of the first to-do lists to get optimization for Safari mobile. What makes it cool is that you can enter items even while you're away from a data connection, as long as you've got the entire page loaded. This isn't as good of a solution as a native application--something that could give you reminders, notifications, and be accessible offline, but it's still quite handy as its own management system.

Toodledo has far more features than you're bound to use. Those looking for more, including a file storage system for group to-do collaboration, as well as an analytics system that crunches through your task history to find trends, can be had with two premium plans that run $15 and $30 a year respectively. You can see a full breakdown of what's included and what's not, along with what the competitors have to offer on this page.

Related: Shifd reimagines the desktop Post-It note

One of the nice things with protothreads (http://www.sics.se/~adam/pt/) is that they can be implemented in pure ANSI C. But…

Today I downloaded my very first Firefox extension, YouTube Comment Snob 1.2. While I love Firefox for the most part (I still have problems with Flash movies, though) I've never found the need to use extensions with it, until now.

Chris Finke's YouTube Comment Snob filters out unwanted YouTube comments based on your criteria. With it, you'll be able to filter by the following attributes:

• The number of spelling mistakes, which is customizable and uses Firefox's built-in spell checker
• All capital letters
• No capital letters
• Doesn't start with a capital letter
• Excessive punctuation (!!!!! ?????)
• Excessive capitalization
• Profanity

You can also choose which language dictionary you want to use.

Some comments on YouTube can actually be insightful and informative so I have to be careful not to miss out on those (really, however most YouTube comments are drivel and not worth the rage that builds inside me as I read them. This new extension actually makes YouTube a much more pleasant place. If I ever find the need to get angry in a pinch however I can always adjust my filtering options.

On Sunday, I had an e-mail alert about someone writing on my Facebook wall--a college acquaintance with whom I hadn't spoken in quite some time. As it turns out, I was a victim of "wall spam," a recent phenomenon on Facebook in which automated spam posts show up on members' message walls. It's similar to a wave of profile spam that swept News Corp.'s MySpace a few years ago.

The message in question read, "Some thinks you are special and has a hot^crush on you. Find out who it could be!! ;)" with a link to a Flash file claiming to be hosted on the imageshack.us domain.

But by the time I navigated to my Facebook profile to get rid of the spammy (and possibly virus-ridden) message--within an hour or two of the notification showing up in the first place--the wall post was gone. This means one of either two things: someone else saw the message on my profile and flagged it, or Facebook is actively policing the site to keep it under control, probably by searching for duplicates of a known spam message.

Of course, an hour or two is still a big enough frame of time for people to click on the link and get their computers loaded with some nasty new malware.

I've asked Facebook for comment on exactly what their strategy is and whether any members' login credentials are getting compromised by this spam or virus. I'll update when I hear back.

"Wall spam" rose to notoriety earlier this month, when members started noticing the phenomenon, and security firms started flagging worms that were spreading via Facebook members' walls and installing malware when a link in the message was clicked. The company has recommended antivirus fixes and says it's acting fast.

The Silicon Alley Insider reported earlier this month that Facebook had been deactivating links in identified spam posts; removing the posts entirely is a more aggressive measure.

"If we get a report of a bug or a hole from a user, a security researcher, a reporter, blogger, or anyone, we check it out and fix it as quickly as possible," Facebook security chair Max Kelly wrote several weeks ago on the company blog in response to another virus. "In fact, we appreciate it when help comes our way from the many security experts and organizations out there."

Transform your iPhone into a mobile shareability tool. Synch/share Outlook, documents and data with team members without Exchange or SharePoint. HyperOffice: Making iPhone a mobile business collaboration and productivity tool. (more…)