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John Bradley, author of xv, has died

voxday.net

11–20 of 97 posts

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#12
xv is my favorite image viewer of all time. I loved how it launched immediately and made it very easy to see an image or browse a folder right from the command-line. 20 years later, computers are dramatically faster and such a fundamental task has become unbearably laggy.

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#14
XV was excellent, and had some features I've never seen anywhere else. For example, it had a control panel that would allow you to take part of the color space and map it uniformly to a different part of the color space, for example, turning all the reds (and just the reds) green.

When my kid, now almost 22, was very small, she would sit on my lap in front of the computer, with XV displaying a picture of Elmo. “Green Elmo!” she would demand. I would adjust the sliders to turn the reds green, and we would laugh uproariously at green Elmo. Next it would be “Purple Elmo!”, and we would laugh even harder.

This kept us both amused for quite a while.

(Update: Here's a picture of what that control panel looked like. The turn-Elmo-green control is top center. https://xv.trilon.com/manual/xv-3.10a/color-editor-1.html)

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#15
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am that man at the Usenix conference.

Cool, are you related to tummy then? I'm just trying to clear up my own confusion.

As much as anybody these days, since tummy.com shut down 3-5 years ago. I left a dozen years ago. I'm the one that wrote the scanning extensions to xv that were mentioned in the posted article. Evelyn and I were co-owners for the first ~22 years.

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#16

https://voxday.net/2026/03/25/rip-john-bradley/

RIP. This should be the main link, we should replace this link instead of the Gab one.

long time lurker, but yeah I didn't need to experience that hatred on my eyeballs

going to go pet the cat for 25 minutes

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#18
post #14

XV was excellent, and had some features I've never seen anywhere else. For example, it had a control panel that would allow you to take part of the color space and map it uniformly to a different part of the color space, for example, turning all the reds (and just the reds) green. When my kid, now almost 22, was very small, she would sit on my lap in front of the computer, with XV displaying a picture of Elmo. “Green…

>a control panel

That control panel was really great! Particularly for scanning, it was nice to be able to adjust some of the color curves slightly to correct the scanned image.

However, one thing I REALLY used that control panel for was greyscale images, you could adjust the curve so that things that were barely legible in the image suddenly popped way out. Almost like that trick of rubbing a pencil across a blank page to reveal what someone wrote on the page above it. Or smaller adjustments just to make a greyscale more uniform.

That was really one of xv's superpowers.

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RIP. This should be the main link, we should replace this link instead of the Gab one.

Maybe. While the vox link is referenced in the page I posted, the vox link provides way, way less flavor than the posted link. Including, notably, the vox link has no mention of Xv.

The flavor in the Gab articles after your post was enough to sour the whole meal.
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