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.

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