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ThumbFall is an Adobe AIR based image search application with a twist, or fall!

This app adds some more great eye candy for viewing an image search from the main providers like:

• yahoo
• Google
• FriendFeed
• FFFound
• 4U
• Baidu Image Search

When the app starts a think chromeless window appears with a simple text field input, search button and minimal application logo. I immediately started looking for a menu or other UI element that I could click on to possibly show the options. You can’t even drag this window around anywhere, which really annoyed me as it was stuck on my small laptop monitor not the larger external LCD I have also got attached as monitor 2.

The main options and preferences are available by right clicking on the taskbar icon (Windows) or the dock icon (OS X). There are options for startup on login, directory where you want to save the local images to and what image search provider to use, only one can be selected at a time. One option I was not sure of was the rather confusing ‘large image rate’ that appears to have little effect over the sizing of the images.

After a quite lengthy wait the search results start to appear at the top and drop down the screen. Using a physics engine you can grab,move and rotate the images. They eventually drop off the bottom. A total number of images from the search is shown in the UI bar at the top.

Nevertheless an interesting way of visualising search results for a bit of desktop fun.

Design eye

Visually it’s a nice display, probably not as cool or as sophisticated as the previously reviewed UVlayer. I would have liked the menu bar to be moveable and please build a standard menu for the options and settings. It seems to be getting more common that people are building UI’s without this option, instead relying upon right click functionality on the dock or taskbar.

Also for quick selection of the search provider, a drop down selector infront of the search field would work brilliantly.

Technical eye

ThumbFall was built using ActionScript 3 and a number of web API’s from the image search providers.