This is a bit of a geeky post, but then this is a geeky computer blog, so … so be it. Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a fan of Nethack, and have been playing it on and off for over fifteen years (mostly off, but recently I’ve rediscovered it again). Well, finally, after all this time, I can say the following:

Interestingly, I almost always play Valkyries, but decided to try Barbarians for a couple of games. The first game, I made it all the way down to level 24 without finding a single altar (except for a non-aligned one in the mines with a nasty priest next to it) before an Arch-Lich and Titan finished me off. The second game was this one. Most of the rest of the time, I do embarrassing things like choke on things or eat something I shouldn’t have. Need to be more careful, I suppose.

Tunneler is an application for Mac OS X to let you run a single SSH tunnel from your system menu bar, typically to securely re-route HTTP (web browsing) traffic to a remote proxy server. If you have ever had to run one of the following commands in a little Terminal window in the corner of your screen, then this application is for you:

ssh -N -L 8123:localhost:8123 bobo@theclown.com
ssh -N -D 8123:localhost bobo@theclown.com

Downloading

• Download Tunneler-0.9.dmg now (HTTP – San Diego, CA)

Introduction

Tunneling is useful for those stuck behind firewalls that block or otherwise prohibit visiting large numbers of sites on the Intarwebs, or perhaps watch your traffic a little too closely for comfort. Common scenarios are office environments or living in countries with national firewalls. This method of circumventing those restrictions has the following requirements:

• You have to have an SSH-accessible account on a server outside of your network somewhere, and you must be proficient enough with unix to set up password-less login for that remote account.
• That remote server must either be:
  • Running a full proxy server of some sort that allows access from localhost
  • Running a recent (in the last 2 years or so) version of SSH that supports the -D flag for SOCKS5 proxy support.
• You must have set up password-less login for your local machine to that remote machine.

I will add support for entering passwords in version 1.0 of Tunneler, but it’s so easy to set up password-less login that I figured I’d release 0.9 for now without that feature.

Tunneler is free software, and has the following system requirements:

• Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or greater
• Enough RAM to boot your computer
• 1MB of disk space.

Using

After setting up and configuring Tunneler, you will have a T item on your menu bar. After configuring the item, you just click “Connect” whenever you want to set up the proxy tunnel.

Please note that if you put your computer to sleep, the tunnel will be disconnected, and after waking up, Tunneler will not reconnect the tunnel automatically (I hope to add this for version 1.0). Furthermore, it will disable itself for 30 seconds or so after the computer wakes up to wait for the networks to reconnect and re-establish themselves. Again, I hope to remove this as well in future versions.

In this 0.9 version, Tunneler will on occasion get a little confused if you connect and disconnect and sleep and wake up your computer a few too many times. Clicking on Disconnect in the menu and then re-connecting will fix this most of the time. Worst case, click on the Kill all Tunnels... menu item, and restart the app. I will clean all this up for the 1.0 release.

Installation

Here’s how to get running with Tunneler 0.9

1. Set up password-less login to your remote server
2. Download Tunneler and install it to your /Applications or ~/Applications folder
3. [optional] Add Tunneler to your startup programs in System Preferences
4. Launch Tunneler, enter Preferences, and click “Connect”
5. Setup your browser to use the tunnel

More details follow now:

Set up password-less login to remote server

On the local machine, launch /Application/Utilities/Terminal.app. In the command window, type:

ssh user@remotehostname.com

If you are asked for a password, you have not set up password-less login. You can search for google for “passwordless login” or just use this link .

Download Tunneler and install it to your /Applications or ~/Applications folder

Just use one of the download links from above and drag the icon from the .dmg file to either your /Applications or ~/Applications folder.

[optional] Add Tunneler to your startup programs in System Preferences

You do this by launching System Preferences, going to “Accounts”, click on the “Login Items” tab, and then clicking the the + symbol below the list of login items. A dialog will show up asking you to select an application, and you should select the version of Tunneler you saved to the hard disk – do not accidentally select the one in the disk image if that is still mounted.

Launch Tunneler, enter Preferences, and click “Connect”

Startup Tunneler manually now to get started with the application. You will see a T show up on your menu bar. Click on this T and select “Preferences”.

Enter:

1. Your user name (on the remote host, not the local machine)
2. The remote host name (or IP address—entering the IP saves a DNS lookup).
3. Select one of the two tunneling options. If you know for sure that your remote host has a proper proxy server, then you can select the first option. Otherwise, use the SSH SOCKS5 proxy by selecting the second option.
4. Finally, pick a port number to do the forwarding over. You need to remember this number for your browser configuration screens later.

Click Save to save the options, and then from the T menu in the System Menu Bar, select Connect.

Setup your browser to use the Tunnel

You will need to know two things before proceeding here:

1. Whether you chose to use a full proxy server or the built-in SSH SOCKS5 proxy.
2. The port number you chose to forward the tunnel over. We’ll call this PORTNUM.

Firefox

To configure Firefox, go to the Preferences dialog, choose “Advanced”, “Network”, and then “Settings…” to configure how Firefox connects to the Internet.

• “Manual proxy configuration:”
• If you chose a full remote proxy server:
  • HTTP Proxy: localhost, Port: PORTNUM
  • Click “Use this proxy server for all protocols”
  • For “No proxy for:”, you can fill in “localhost, 127.0.0.1” if it is not already there.
• If you are using the built-in SSH SOCKS5 proxy:
  • Leave HTTP proxy blank
  • UNcheck “Use this proxy server for all protocols”
  • Under “SOCKS Host:” enter localhost, PORTNUM
  • leave all other protocol thingies blank.
  • For “No proxy for:”, you can fill in “localhost, 127.0.0.1” if it is not already there.

Safari/Camino

Both of these browsers use the system preferences connection settings, so you need to configure them as follows:

• Launch System Preferences
• Click on “Network”
• Choose and double click on the network interface over which you wish to route your traffic (note that if you want to configure this for both your wireless internet and your ethernet cable-based connections, you will have to repeat these instructions for each interface.
• Click on “Proxies”
• If you chose a full remote proxy server:
  • Click on the checkbox next to “Web Proxy (HTTP”)
  • For “Web Proxy Server”, enter localhost:PORTNUM
• If you are using the built-in SSH SOCKS5 proxy:
  • Click on the checkbox next to “SOCKS Proxy”
  • For “Socks Proxy Server” enter localhost:PORTNUM
• Click “Apply Now”

Other Notes

Traffic

If you (or the friend you are bumming the SSH connection from) pays for bandwidth on the remote SSH server, be aware that routing all of your web traffic over that connection is going to result in a spike in their traffic usage – every thing you download will count as double its actual size against any traffic limits (once to download the file to the server, and another to send it back to you over the SSH tunnel). Please be aware of your traffic consumption.

Bug Reports, Feature Requests

Please feel free to send any comments or questions my way to marcwan at this domain.

If you have any artistic skills whatsoever and a little free time to spare, I would dearly appreciate a new icon for this program. You’ll get credits and the gratitude of anybody who previously had to look at the abomination of an icon that I am currently using !!!

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 3.0. 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 about a 2MB file and takes about 45 seconds.

• Download JustLooking-3.0.dmg now (BitTorrent – TPB).
• Download JustLooking-3.0.dmg now (HTTP – San Diego, CA)

JustLooking 3.0 pretty much contains more new features and code than all the previous versions of JustLooking combined! New features include:

• New transition effects in full screen mode.
• A thumbnails / preview window with thumbnails of all windows in the same directory.
• Image resizing support.
• Recent Images file menu.
• A new look and feel for the toolbar.
• Toolbar buttons can be made small or large.
• An Update Checking system to look for new versions of JustLooking (including automatic updates).
• Saving of Images to a number of different formats with configurable settings (including animated GIFs).
• (optional) Honouring Exif Orientation value when showing images.
• (optional) The mouse wheel can move between images now.
• Stretch to Window mode has been added. It can be the default mode.
• (optional) Disable Screen Saver in Full Screen Slide Mode.
• Hide Cursor in full screen slide show.
• (optional) When returning from slide show, viewer window moves to same image.
• DEL key deletes images.
• Arrow keys now work in full screen mode.
• Delete confirmation is optional now (preferences).
• There is a new Image Info Window.
• (optional) Automatically open first file in last folder visited.
• (optional) program can go directly to full screen slide show.
• A new context menu has been added.
• Background colour can be changed.
• Set as Desktop Background option.
• File Associations preference has been fixed.
• Lots of bug fixes.

Note that image saving has been expanded to allow you to save files in any of 5 supported formats (more coming). I currently do not preserve meta-data (EXIF, PNG info, etc), nor do I support animated GIFs, but will support this in the next version hopefully. You can now also scale and save images, which will be quite convenient.

JustLooking 3.0 includes the following language translations:

• French
• Italian
• Swedish
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• Dutch
• Slovenian (new!)
• Polish (new!)

Due to the large number of changes in 3.0, the following translations have not been included, and will hopefully be added to a language update in a few weeks as I get help from users:

• Russian
• German
• Norwegian
• Finnish
• Chinese (Traditional)

Thanks to all the people who help out with translations. Shipping this program in multiple languages is extremely cool! (I actually have a Hungarian version in the works too. Super cool!)

As always, I’d love to hear your comments and feedback on 3.0, and hopefully there won’t be many problems that need fixing!! I have been using 3.0 for a few weeks here by myself without much trouble, so I hope this good luck continues!

New for Version 2.5:

• Core Image, OpenGL, and Quartz drawing for faster image processing and transitions.
• Deleting the last image in a directory caused an exception an error message bug fixed.
• Rotating zoomed images not updating scroll bars bug fixed.
• Dutch/Flemish version added (thanks to Olaf de Vries).
• Added some people to the credits whom I had forgotten. Apologies Emmanuel and Mathias!

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.

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
• 4MB 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
• French – Emmanuel Lemor
• Swedish – Henrik Östlund
• Swedish – Mathias Sjöström
• Chinese (Simplified) – Zhang Tongzhu
• Chinese (Simplified) – Emma Liu
• Italian – Marco Frasca
• German – Marc’s dad.
• Chinese (Traditional) – Nitoc Taiwan
• Portuguese (Brasilian) – Helvécio Mafra
• Dutch / Flemish – Olaf de Vries
• Slovenian – Miha Rekar
• Polish – Tymon Kokoszka
• Chinese (Simplified) – Jack Zhong

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.

For the last 17 years or so, I’ve been a huge fan of the various BSD-inspired operating systems, starting with SunOS 4.1.x, and then moving on towards the various free flavours available for the PC, such as Bill Jolitz’s 386bsd, then FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. For a while, even I was a regular contributer to the NetBSD community, and enjoyed playing with them all.

When I started installing and running my own servers for mail and web application purposes about 8 years ago, there was an abortive few-month attempt to use Microsoft Windows Server, but since then it’s all been FreeBSD, with the latest lanfear.com server being FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE (and with an uptime of 2 years, which would have been nearly 3 had my ISP not hacked and rebooted my machine one day).

To this date, various SYSV-inspired features, such as initd and their directory structure leave me with a bad taste in my mouth. I have repeatedly stuck with types of linux such as SuSE (before it sucked), and Ubuntu, that still gave me /etc/rc and familiar directory structures. Mac OS X still gives me warm tingly feelings to this day.

So, it is with some sadness that I recently decided to move from my own dedicated server to a virtual server hosting solution. I’m simply never in the USA any more, and I don’t want to have to worry about my computer going down. A virtual server comes with a guarantee that all hardware problems are the ISPs, and is a bit cheaper to boot. I usually hover around a 0.00 load average, so serious computing power isn’t a necessity for me.

However, the cheapest package with the best bandwidth means my server will, henceforth, be running Ubuntu Server. It is reasonably familiar to me … I can still add things to /etc/rc.local, and the rest of /etc isn’t too alien, and the apt-get scheme seems to work reasonably well. My needs are less these days, as I slowly admit defeat in the email world and let people like Google do it for me, so as long as I can run web apps and a few other fun things, I’m happy. All of my sites and addresses have already been moved to the new server.

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 2.5. 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 about a 2MB file and takes about 45 seconds. (The HTTP link contains 2.5.1, which contains some minor language updates for the Dutch, French, and Traditional Chinese versions).

• Download JustLooking-2.5.dmg now (BitTorrent – TPB).
• Download JustLooking-2.5.dmg now (HTTP).

While JustLooking 2.5 looks completely unchanged from version 2.0, most of the important plumbing underneath has been replaced! I have completely substituted all of the NSImage based drawing in the old versions with new Core Image, OpenGL, and Quartz image handling code. This has made JustLooking significanly faster at processing images, and transitions between images should now be extremely smooth, even on slower G4 (and hopefully G3 machines too). I have tested the new code on a Mac Book Pro, PowerBook G4 (1.67) and a MacBook with shared video RAM. All were quite responsive and smooth.

There has been one “regression” in the program because of this, and that is that the main graphics viewing area is no longer transparent. It turns out that making the OpenGL window do this is quite tricky, and given how many people weren’t thrilled about the semi-transparent background, I figured it would be okay to ship with this “limitation”. Do you really miss it? Add a comment and let me know.

I am now going to begin working in earnest on version 3.0. In addition to all sorts of new features that users have been requesting for a long time, there are a few ugly things in the current version that I simply have to fix:

• The scroll bars are always out of place.
• The default scaling algorithm, while fast, is totally ghetto and looks like crap.
• The current saving of rotated images is extremely primitive (except for the lossless JPEG rotation) and really needs to be fixed.

New for Version 2.5:

• Core Image, OpenGL, and Quartz drawing for faster image processing and transitions.
• Deleting the last image in a directory caused an exception an error message bug fixed.
• Rotating zoomed images not updating scroll bars bug fixed.
• Dutch/Flemish version added (thanks to Olaf de Vries).
• Added some people to the credits whom I had forgotten. Apologies Emmanuel and Mathias!

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)
• Dutch / Flemish

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
• 4MB 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
• French – Emmanuel Lemor
• Swedish – Henrik Östlund
• Swedish – Mathias Sjöström
• Chinese (Simplified) – Zhang Tongzhu
• Chinese (Simplified) – Emma Liu
• Italian – Marco Frasca
• German – Marc’s dad.
• Chinese (Traditional) – Nitoc Taiwan
• Portuguese (Brasilian) – Helvécio Mafra
• Dutch / Flemish – Olaf de Vries

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.

Well, sometime in the last week or so, JustLooking broke the 25 000 download barrier. It’s hard to be sure exactly when, since a lot of the downloads are via bittorrent, and I don’t have exact stats on all the places that it’s been uploaded to, but I have counted at least 6 500 torrent downloads in addition to the 20 000+ direct HTTP downloads on my actual server.

For a program of only six months of life, I’m reasonably pleased with this. It started out with only English, French, Italian, and Spanish in version 1.0, and has since added (in addition to doing those languages correctly): Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, and Portuguese.

The program itself has gone from being a rather ugly little clone of the windows Win32 image viewing application to something a bit more Mac-like, and with its own growing feature set. While it’s definitely not for everybody (it is far better suited to people who like to manage images by hand in various directories on their machine), there does seem to be a growing user base, and I hope to most people happy with future versions!

I’m already beginning to plan out the next major version of the program, and while I won’t spoil all the fun, I’ve been reading everybody’s comments in the various articles on this blog. So this is your last chance: If there’s anything you would really like to see in version 3, add a comment to this article, and I just might add it!

I’d like to give a special thanks to those people who have helped me localise the program, thus far: Stefanie Schau, Laurent Molina, Roberto Bellina, Carola Clavo, Sergey Melnik, Markus Peltomäki, Emmanuel Lemor, Geir Werner Hagen, Mathias Sjöström, Henrik Östlund, Zhang Tongzhu, Emma Liu, Marco Frasca, Nitoc Taiwan, and Helvécio Mafra. Special thanks are also due to Yann le Coroller, who has been helping out with various user interface suggestions and ideas.

Here’s looking forward to the next 25 000 downloads and beyond, and to hoping that the program doesn’t get so popular that I can’t afford to host it any more on my servers!