From Penny Arcade…

NOTE: JustLooking 3.1 has been released. You should really be using that version instead. It’s much cooler!

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 2.0.2. JustLooking is a program to view pictures and images on your Mac OS X (Tiger) based computer. JustLooking is a Universal Binary, and can be run on both PowerPC and Intel Macs. The program is and will always be very free.

Please note that I pay for my own bandwidth, so please try to use the BitTorrent version of the download if you are able to—it’s a 2MB file and takes about 45 seconds.

• Download JustLooking-2.0.2.dmg now (BitTorrent – TPB).
• Download JustLooking-2.0.2.dmg now (HTTP).

New for Version 2.0.2:

• The arrow key navigation problem that some, but not all, users have been seeing has been fixed.
• Support for the following languages has been added:
  • Portuguese (Brasilian)
  • Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan)

New for Version 2.0.1:

• The following localisations have been added or updated:
  • Norwegian
  • Swedish
  • Simplified Chinese
  • Italian (updated)
  • German (updated)
  • French (updated)
• I have been working on adding accessibilty features to JustLooking, but the docs on this are kinda monstrous, and it’s taking some time to work through.
• There are no major bug fixes in the 2.0.1 release. I am investigating a couple of common problems relating to arrow keys on certain older macs, and will post a fix for that as soon as possible.

New for Version 2.0:

• Based on the suggestions and feedback from some users, I have completely redesigned and rewritten the user interface for JustLooking, implementing the smoked-black look that a lot of applications are moving towards in Leopard.
• Image resizing has been made significantly faster and less memory intensive. Image rendering is also much quicker.
• There is now remote control support in slide show mode:
  • next/prev image
  • pause/restart
  • exit
  • increase/decrease show time by 2 sec
• Basic saving of rotated images for PNG, GIF (non-animated only), JPEG, TIFF, and BMP file formats.
• GIF file support has been completely fixed and is now properly working for all animated and transparent images.
• Hold down “option” key on startup causes app to go to full screen slide show.
• I have fixed a number of bugs in the program.

I have released JustLooking in all of the following languages:

• English
• Russian
• French
• Italian
• German
• Spanish
• Finnish
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Portuguese (Brasilian)
• Chinese (Traditional)

Note that a few of the translations have a few missing strings. If you speak one of these languages fluently and are willing to help out translate about 25 strings, let me know and I’ll be grateful for the help! (if you speak any other language and are willing to help, let me know!)

Introduction

Welcome to JustLooking, an image viewing program for Mac OS X. JustLooking is designed to be used instead of the “Preview” application on your computer for browsing images. In particular, it has the following differences:

• It focuses on files and directories instead of lists of files. Thus, once you load a file, you can easily navigate through all other files in the same directory.
• It displays images at their native resolution instead of interpreting DPI information stored in the image meta-data. While images are printed at the maximum resolution possible, on screen they are displayed pixel-by-pixel.
• Being designed more for viewing of Images, it properly shows animated GIF files.
• The entire program can easily be manipulated and powered by simple keystrokes for a quick and pleasant viewing experience.
• JustLooking also supports such basic features as printing and rotating and will hopefully prove to be sufficiently functional for most users’ needs.

It should be noted that the application cannot completely replace Preview, as there are a number of features in the latter that JustLooking simply does not have, such as selecting and copying regions, saving images in various formats, and viewing of Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

Requirements and Installation

Running JustLooking is quite simple, and the only requirements are:

• Mac OS X 10.4 or greater
• 256MB RAM
• 2.5MB free disk space

JustLooking is installed on any new machine by simply dragging it into the Applications folder.

Credits

JustLooking was designed, written, and partially localised (French, Italian, German, Spanish, and some Chinese) by Marc Wandschneider here in Beijing over a couple of casual months. I sat down to write it as a replacement for Preview, as I found the latter to rarely operate in a way that I wanted it to. I tend to keep directories full of images, whether they be traveling, family, or junk I collect from the Intarwebs.

Finder and Preview rarely let me select and view more than a couple hundred of images at a time, and I have large numbers of folders with more files than that.

The following people have helped with Localisation of JustLooking:

• German – Stefanie Schau
• French – Laurent Molina
• Italian – Roberto Bellina
• Spanish – Carola Clavo
• Russian – Sergey Melnik
• Finnish – Markus Peltomäki
• Norwegian – Geir Werner Hagen
• Swedish – Henrik Östlund
• Chinese (Simplified) – Zhang Tongzhu
• Chinese (Simplified) – Emma Liu
• Italian – Marco Frasca
• Chinese (Traditional) – Nitoc Taiwan
• Portuguese (Brasilian) – Helvécio Mafra

Help us Out

Speak a language that isn’t in the list of currently localised languages? See some mistakes in the current translation for a particular language? If you’d like to help or offer corrections, I’d love the help. The more languages, the better!!

Coming Up

I’m thinking of adding the following features in future versions.

• Support for saving more image file formats.
• Resizing and saving of images.
• Batch resizes and renames (the holy grail of free image programs).
• Support for more resizing algorithms.

I’d love to hear if users have any suggestions. Feel free to contact me with any features you’d like to see!

Inspired by Alex, here’s a brief laundry list…

Operating Systems:

• OSX: I’ve recently become a Mac user. Years ago I used NEXTSTEP, first on the original 68030/68040-based NeXT machines, and later on x86 hardware, one of the three architectures to which NeXT ported their software before being acquired by Apple in 1997.
• Linux: I’m thinking about trying out Ubuntu for use on development desktops. It’s not clear any of the bigger name distributions still exist in a form suited to my regular needs. My main file and print server in my home office is based on Fedora-Core.
• Windows: The fastest machines in the house are still Windows boxes, but regular daily use on these machines has declined. They’re more frustrating and less fun than the new Unix-based Macs, and I’ve been doing more open source work than Windows-bound work in the last couple of years, a situation hard to complain about given some of the discouraging developments that have been accumulating on the backs of Windows developers in recent years.

Languages:

There’s an emphasis on scripting languages here, because they’re what I’ve been playing with lately… They aren’t the beginning or end of the languages that I use or am interested in. Also, defining one’s skill set by how many languages’ syntax one knows often turns out to be limiting in a bunch of ways.

Scripty Languages

• PHP: I came to the PHP world to work on SWiK. For a while, I was at least partially there, although in the last year or so I’ve probably done at most a couple of weeks of work with PHP.
• Ruby: I’d been intrigued by Ruby for a while and started working with it in late 2005. Alas, I’ve tended to go in and out of it on an as-needed and as-time-permits basis, so my facility with the language has oscillated continually. After this time, I’m still a fan of its metaprogramming support, much of which is nicely exploited by Rails, and the language as a whole remains comfortable and expressive although there are a few aspects of it that I avoid like the plague. I’m very curious to see what will happen with things like JRuby. Having access to a reasonable notion of threading rather than what the Ruby interpreter seems to currently do in this area would be particularly nice.
• Python: I started to play with it back in 2004, but then got sidetracked into something else. I’m still hoping to get back to it, but don’t know if Ruby will continue to defuse the urge.
• Tcl: Haven’t used it lately, but worked on a fairly big system that used it extensively a few years ago.

Systems-y Languages

• Java: I now treat Java as my first pick, middle-of-the-road, “systems”-code sort of language. Performance has come a long way since 1995, the ecology of tools, complements and libraries, particularly open source ones, has become both wide and deep, and some of the tools help one be hugely productive (or at least more than one would be in the old C/tags/cscope/cbrowser/make/etc days).
• C: For stuff that has to be lower level than Java, I often would go straight from Java to C, without stopping over at C++, for reasons too long-winded to go into in this space.
• C++ : Although I can’t say I’m terribly worked up about the new additions to the language that have happened in the last few years, and I’m not sure that the initial goals of the language have held up terribly well as time has gone on, I try to avoid getting too far away from C++ even though I haven’t found myself using it daily in a while. Provided one has good impulse control, this can be a productive language, it’s just that the temptations to lose that control have multiplied hugely over time, as have the pitfalls and sinkholes that can leave even a solid developer not realizing what they’ve wrought until it’s almost too late.

Other Languages

For a long time, I thought it would be great to have a pressing, practical reason to do some functional programming again. Some of Ruby’s features recapture enough of that flavor that, I don’t find myself missing FP techniques as much as I would from C or Java.

In the last six months or so I’ve had a chance to look at OCaml and Haskell in conjunction with a project I’ve been involved in since October. I’ve also been spending an increasing amount of time around R, an open source cousin of SPLUS. I strongly suspect that ideas from these languages are going to creep more into the mainstream over the next five or so years.

Development Tools

• Emacs: The venerable kitchen sink that contains the kitchen-sink with a picture of a kitchen-sink painted on the inside of the kitchen-sink of text editors.
• IntelliJ IDEA: Not open source, but the nicest Java development experience I’ve had.
• Locomotive: A nicely packaged Rails distribution with all the trimmings for OS X. It can get you started up in minutes, rather than the afternoon it might take to work around some of the quirks of the Ruby implementation that Apple ships. It also doesn’t pollute your system or trample anything, so whatever Ruby-oid tools you had outside of Locomotive live on unmolested.

Browsing and Yapping

• Adium: The duckiest IM client for OS X.
• Colloquy: I never had much use for IRC, because for years it seemed from afar like a vast pool of college students repeatedly sending the string “What are you wearing?”, but I’ve recently discovered that some of the technical forums are actually decent places to share information. Colloquy is a nice OS X client for IRC.
• Firefox: My second most-used browser. A bit weird on OS X.
• Camino: My new most-used browser. Some of the fish out of water-isms of Firefox on OS X are remedied fairly nicely.

Other Miscellaneous Applications

• I’ve recently become hooked on OmniOutliner Pro for keeping track of to-do lists, notes on things I’m learning or investigating, and so on. I suspect I’m only scratching the surface of what it can do, but it’s finally replaced my previous way of doing this, which was Emacs outline-mode, partly because it’s so easy to stick in rich content if one has it.
• I have a lot of books. Delicious Library shows some real promise for helping organize and take care of them.
• Parallels Desktop for Mac: About the only Windows application I still need to use with any regularity is QuickBooks. I know that a Mac port exists, but my accountant has warned me to beware treating Mac/PC cross-compatibility with it too glibly. In order to exchange data with him, I’ve taken to running it in a Parallels VM, and the experience has been great. The new “Coherence” UI feature lets me minimize the amount of Windows Fugly that pollutes my OS X desktop by having just the Windows app that I’m using look klunky and homely, rather than a whole big window full of homely suck.

Aquamacs is a Mac-like version of the powerful Emacs text editor that runs as a standard OS X application. It features extensive customization that enables it to conform better with Apple’s standard Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) than standard versions of the editor do.

External Links

• Aquamacs 0.9.9 disk image