Over the years, I’ve been a number of different places, and generally taken far too many photos of them. I’ve kept a log of all these photos (partly to keep my family from worrying about me and partly to help me remember all the places I’ve been and people I’ve met) over that time. This site was first called europe.lanfear.com, then travel.lanfear.com, and now marcwan.com

The last time I updated the site was in mid-2000 to handle more than just the reports from the Europe trip I did in 1999. Since then, a single XML file has been suffering under the weight of about 100 trips and some 200 more sub-trip reports.

So, a few months ago, I started a little side project to rewrite the engine entirely from scratch, moving to PHP and MySQL, and handling some of the scalability issues by moving the image serving to Amazon’s S3 service. The result is a new site that, while superficially similar to the old one, is completely new and improved and more awesomer. By using MySQL’s FULLTEXT indexes, the site now has search capabilities, and I’ve also added support for panorama photos and YouTube-like videos that anybody can view in their browser.

The next time I get some spare time, I’ll go ahead and add in some support for comments, but for now, enjoy the new site, and the 20-odd new trip reports that just been added!

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:

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.

With version 2.5 being a lot easier than I thought, I began working on version 3 of JustLooking sometime in late June, and the results are almost ready for public consumption. I finished coding up major new features last Monday, and am now just waiting for help from translator volunteeers (thank you!) and will fix some bugs before releasing the final version of 3.0 in the next couple of weeks.

I use it every day on my machine already, and it’s more useful than ever.

In addition to a newer, nicer looking ToolBar, I have added a Thumbnails window to let you browse other images in the same directory:

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!

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!

Thanks to everybody for making this happen!

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 2.0.2. 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 a 2MB file and takes about 45 seconds.

• Download JustLooking-2.0.2.dmg now (BitTorrent – TPB).
• Download JustLooking-2.0.2.dmg now (HTTP).

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)

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!)

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 2.0.1. JustLooking is a program to view pictures and images on your Mac OS X (Tiger) based computer. JustLooking is and will always be very free.

• Download JustLooking-2.0.1.dmg now (HTTP).

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)

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!)

I’m pleased to announce the immediate availablity of JustLooking 2.0. JustLooking is a program to view pictures and images on your Mac OS X (Tiger) based computer. JustLooking is and will always be very free.

NOTE: JustLooking 2.0.2 is the latest version of JustLooking. You should really be using that version instead. It’s much cooler!

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 a 1.7MB file and takes about 30 seconds.

• Download JustLooking-2.0.dmg now (BitTorrent – TPB).
• Download JustLooking-2.0.dmg now (HTTP).

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

Note that all of the translations except English and Russian 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!)

So, after a month or so of active development, I’m almost ready with version 2.0 of JustLooking. I’m just waiting for some localisation help, and then I’ll go ahead with the release. The first releases were quite functional, but pretty ugly, I think. A few users from the internet made some suggestions on how to improve the UI and I have completely redesigned it.

In addition to a complete update to the user interface, I have added the following new features to version 2.0:

• Saving of rotated images (JPEGs, GIFs, PNGs, BMPs, and TIFFs)
• Remote Control Support in slide show mode.
• Image displaying and resizing is muuuuucchhh faster now.
• Hold down the ‘OPTION’ key on startup goes to full screen slide show.
• many bug fixes in the code, including some animated GIF problems.

I will spend the next week or so fixing the last couple of bugs in the program and waiting for the last bits of localisation help to come in, and will then release it both on this server and on the BitTorrent networks.

Please feel free to send me your requests for future versions or reports of any bugs or problems you find in the program. I’m thinking the next big features will lie in image resizing and saving of images in different formats.

I am pleased to announced the immediate availability of JustLooking 1.1. JustLooking is a program to view images and pictures on your Mac OS X-based computer.

NOTE: JustLooking 2.0 has been released. You should really be using that version instead. It’s much cooler!

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 1.1MB file and takes about 20 seconds.

• Download JustLooking-1.1.0.dmg now. (BitTorrent – TPB)
• Download JustLooking-1.1.0.dmg now. (HTTP)

New For 1.1

I have added a bunch of new features for the 1.1 release, including:

• added support for dragging a folder onto JustLooking. We will open the first file in that folder.
• Left and Right arrow keys navigate images in main window.
• Command + Left or Right arrow now skips a set number of images (controlled via Preferences).
• you can now drag an image from Safari onto JustLooking and it will both save the image to a folder (controlled via Preferences) and display it. (Firefox has a bug and doesn’t “play” OS X correctly, so you can’t drag onto us from there …)
• You can now actually take ownership of unowned file types via new pane in Preferences
• Added more full screen slideshow keystrokes and cool graphics. Keys include:
  • ‘p’ for pause/resume
  • ‘r’ to reverse direction of playing.
  • ‘n’ and ‘b’ for next/back (previous) respectively.
  • space bar now resumes in appropriate direction.
• Completely reworked the Zoom user interface so it doesn’t interfere with the keyboard.
• Added keyboard accelerators for Zoom:
  • CMD+1 = 100%
  • CMD+2 = 200%
  • CMD+3 = Fit to Window
  • CMD+4 = Other…
• Fixed a couple of animated GIF problems. There is still a problem with transparency which will be the first thing fixed for the next version.
• You can now show or hide the toolbar at the bottom of the main window.
• Massive improvements to many of the existing localisations and new Russian and Finnish translations! Awesome!

There are a few features I had hoped to get into 1.1, including the ability to go straight to full-screen mode and some tweaking that will get into the next version. Thanks to everybody who has suggested features thus far.

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.