I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 3.2. JustLooking is a program to view pictures and images on your Mac OS X (Tiger or Leopard) 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.
JustLooking 3.2 contains a number of critical bug fixes and minor improvements on the 3.1 release.
- The Leopard CoreImage memory leak has been avoided
- Image blurring in regular view is fixed
- Image rotation and resizing saving is now fixed
- Finnish and German language translations are back (yay!)
- The Korean “File” menu is no longer translated as “Delete File”
- AppleRemote support is back in Leopard
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 3.2 includes the following language translations:
- French
- Italian
- Swedish
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Portuguese
- Spanish
- Dutch
- Slovenian
- Polish
- Korean
- Catalàn
- Finnish (back!)
- German (back!)
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
- German – Steven Simmat
- Finnish – Jouni Kähkönen
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!
There's one small cosmetic thing that's bugging me though:
every time I go to the next image, there's a small pause in the fade transition effect.
Any idea as to what could be the cause?
I'm using a MBP 2.2 GHz (summer 2007 model), running Leopard 10.5.3
Yah, that jerkiness when doing transitions appears to be because CoreImage has to "prep" the transition once and then can smoothly do it after that ... i'll see if there's a way to get it be faster ....
I do the following filters / transformations: resize, (rotation,) translation, and then a fade transition.
i'll update my blog as i figure out new ideas.
thanks for the feedback.
m.
thanks,
-bill w.
The sorting currently used is that returned by the NSFileManager object in Cocoa, which appears to sort for HFS filesystems, but I guess not for other file systems.
I'll make a note to add some code to allow more user control over sorting for the next version.
thanks,
marc.
thank you very much & congrats for your good job! It is fast and nice.
I have a few simple suggestions:
- to display EXIF in INFO (like in Xee, for instance)
- to give the possibility to automatically save changes after tweaking the settings
- to move the (save) button close to the rotate ones, to avoid travels of the mouse...
Thx and good luck !
There already is a thumbnail window (Cmd+T), but i'm thinking of integrating it into the main window for the next version.
Thanks!
m.
Maybe silly question but how can i change interface language (switch from english to other language). I checked all menu bar and pref pane..... nothing. Did not find a place where can i do that. Help!?
I’m thinking about to make translation in latvian :)
The feature I was initially looking for that was lost from 10.3's Preview.app was the ability to export to different color depths. Specifically, with PNGs, I was able to drop down to 16-bit or 8-bit greyscale and shrink file sizes considerably.
The second thing I noticed was that there weren't as many printing options as in Preview.app. This was a place that 10.5's preview was an improvement. I could easily center the print and set the scale. Preview would give a nice, live updating, image in the print dialog to show what it was going to do.
Anyway, I will keep my eye on JustLooking for the future though. Thanks!
-Support for resizing, cropping images
-A better name like Look or Looky or PreviewX (run a poll)
-The Thumbnail drawer thing, would be great idea, else it takes up another window.
Otherwise your program does exactly what it is supposed to and does it very very well. I sorted my vacation pics in two minutes using this, Arrow keys and the Delete button. It aint possible in Preview.
Posted By: marcwan Jun 11, 2008 16:42:38
"There already is a thumbnail window (Cmd+T), but i'm thinking of integrating it into the main window for the next version."
That is a great idea! I do find it a bit cumbersome to have 2 different windows to deal with. (for moving, resizing, minimizing, etc.)
A sidebar would be a much more elegant choice in my opinion.
It'd be extra awesome if there could be a choice of whether it's a vertical sidebar or a horizontal pane (a la Windows XP's Filmstrip view), and even the choice of placing it on the left/right or top/bottom. That'd give users the choice to place it to their liking.
2)
Speaking of the Thumbnail Window, here's an issue I've mentioned before, long ago.
I find that in the Thumbnail Window, there aren't enough characters for the file names.
For instance,
something like "Christmas Party 2008 - john and mary.jpg" would be shortened to "Chris... ary.jpg"
It'd be nice if it would be a 2-line filename display, much like the Finder.
It'd allow the filenames to be much more readable.
3)
I find the current keyboard shortcuts for zooming a bit flawed.
Let's see:
Command 1 - Actual Size/100%
Command 2 - 200%
Command 3 - Fit to Window
Command 4 - Stretch to Window
Command 5 - Other...
To me, this seems somewhat random.
Also, Command 3 (Fit to Window) and Command 4 (Stretch to Window) are not necessarily larger than 100% and 200%,
so as you can imagine, going from Command 1 to Command 4 doesn't make sense in some situations. (zooms in, then shrinks, then zooms in again)
I'd suggest Command 0 for 100%, since that's the standard used by many programs, including Preview.
Also, it's close to Command - and Command +, which are the Zoom Out/In keyboard shortcuts, such that you have the Zoom Out, Zoom In and "reset zoom" shortcuts all next to each other.
Actually, since - and + work by themselves as Zoom Out/In, I'd suggest just 0 to also work as 100%.
Command 2 for 200% is not all that necessary. (If there's a keyboard shortcut for 200%, then why not 300%? Why not 50%?)
And I'd definitely suggest something else than Command 3 and Command 4 for Fit to Window and Stretch to Window.
4)
Unless I'm missing something, there is still no mouse-only way to exit Slide Show.
View > Start Slide Show is inactive.
File > Close is active but has no effect when clicked.
The only way to exit Slide Show is to press the Escape key.
Thanks a lot for your time and for your efforts in making JustLooking!
Excellent software. Does virtually everything I want it to do, with one small exception. I would love to see the + and - keys zoom level to be a bit more granular. It goes from non-zoomed to damn, that's way too big far too quickly. It would also be nice if it zoomed from the center of the image rather than the bottom left.
That's the only improvement I can think of.
Marc Wands, thank you for your worthy contribution into the Mac World experience.
Example:
http://img61.imageshack.us/img61/3980/msnsmiliesvv7.gif
Anyways thank you again.
Either way brilliant work...
Thanks,
marc.
Remember how smooth the slideshow transition used to be in Tiger's Finder? That's what I would like. Right now, it seems like I've got the WinXP slideshow on my screen.\
Look and feel of the application is right. Just got to iron out the smoothness of transitions, I feel. Many thanks; for now I revert to Preview.
this is truly a great viewer for the Mac, fast and fullscreen without all the fuzzy eye catching gizmos that others have, thanks a lot for that.
This will absolutly be my deafalt viewer in my image editing workflow.
Fats enough to view diffrent versions of the same image to make minor changes pop-out... Great.
Now...
1. Is it possible to have it support image fileformats that MacOS X already has built in support for? Like the Sony ARW and cRaw formats and others?
2. I would love if the 'mouse' wheel could have the option to do smooth zooming ala the winXP deafault viewer... Yup, just switched from PC to Mac... :-)
3. Mouse press and drag on images zoomed larger than the window (instead of having to use the 2 scrollbars)?
Regards
Lasse
Nice clean app! This could be a daily user for me if it had a random or shuffle option in slide show mode. What's the chance?
Thx!
Charles
But the only major feature that is missing for me is that
it only finds images from within a single folder.
What I mean is that if I have a Main Folder that has a
collection of 10 folders with 100 images inside of each,
It will not load the Main one with all ten folders (1000) images. You can
only load One folder of 100 images at a time...
I posted about this last update and I really wish that it
had this feature because I literally have thousands of pics
and many folder within folders...I just want to load the
Main folder and have it load every folder contained
inside...I hope this makes sense.
Thank You!!
G
