I am pleased to announced the immediate availability of JustLooking 1.0. JustLooking is a program to view images and pictures on your Mac OS X-based computer.

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 1MB file and takes about 20 seconds.

• Download JustLooking-1.0.1.dmg now. (BitTorrent)
• Download JustLooking-1.0.1.dmg now. (HTTP)

Introduction

Welcome to JustLooking, an image viewing program for Mac OS X. JustLooking is designed to be a replacment for 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 is not designed to 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
• 2MB 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
• Chinese (Simplified) – Emma Liu

More complete Italian and Chinese localisations are on the way soon!

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.

• Image scaling improvements—Currently, image scaling and resizing is done in memory and not on the video card at render time. This will be the first thing fixed in the next version.
• Info Dialogs—Support for viewing (editing?) the meta-data associated with those image file formats that support this.
• Saving of rotated images—This will also require support for properly rotating JPEG images without introducing new artifacting and further destroying data.
• More Slide Show Features—I’d like to support more features in the slide show.

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