I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 3.1. 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 3.1MB file and takes about 60 seconds.

• Download JustLooking-3.1.dmg now (BitTorrent – TPB).
• Download JustLooking-3.1.dmg now (HTTP – San Diego, CA)

JustLooking 3.1 contains a number of bug fixes and minor improvements on the 3.0 release.

• The toolbar no longer takes keyboard focus.
• SPACE Advances images in the regular viewer.
• Cmd+I toggles Image Info visibility.
• You can copy images from the context menu of images.
• - and +/= keys can be used to control zoom levels.
• Cmd+Backspace now deletes images.
• New Korean and Catalan translations.

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!)
• Korean (new!)
• Catalàn (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
• Catalàn – Iván Ponce Gómez
• Korean – Kim Hanjo

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!