John Bradley, author of xv, has died • Hacker News Board

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#61

Post by imiric » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 11:23 PM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #21

To expand on this a little bit: I had a friend that wanted to scan the cover of his album to start selling copies of it online. This would have been in like 1995 maybe. I went out and bought a HP ScanJet and wrote a command-line program run the scanner and grab that image for him. I started thinking about making a GUI companion to it. I kept thinking "I need to do this like xv does, I need to do that like xv does." I…

Great story, thanks for sharing. RIP John.

I kind of miss the age of freeware and shareware. It was often created by passionate individuals who put in a lot of care into the end product, which made it a joy to use. Once you paid for the software, you not only got the full version, but you felt good supporting someone who genuinely deserves it. There are still some examples of this, perhaps more so in the Apple ecosystem where proprietary/commercial software is the norm, but high quality software worth paying for is still rare.

Nowadays most software on Linux is open source, which is great, but the average quality is low, a lot of it is produced with little care and effort, it's quickly abandoned, and now in the age of "AI", even more so.

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#62

Post by kstrauser » Thu, Mar 26, 2026, 11:34 PM UTC

tzs wrote: post #58

paulpauper wrote: post #34

I am confused why this goes to a tribute page to a musician when everyone is talking about a software developer?

So far only two linkable reports of his death have been found. The other is on a Twitter-like site that is so full of anti-semite, white nationalist, and similar content and has so little of anything else that it makes Twitter look like a far left hang out. Bradley wrote xv a long time ago and appears to be better known for his later work, including his music. Here's how he described himself on Soundcloud [1]: > Guit…

Thanks for taking the time to distill that. I saw the same there. When I say that Gab is a dumpster fire, I don't mean that some people there have political positions that I don't personally agree with. I mean that it's packed full of utterly vile content. This isn't some hangout for the likes of George Will and conservative intellectuals, saying calm, rational things that violate the "woke agenda" or such.

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#63

Post by microtherion » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 12:13 AM UTC

BobBagwill wrote: post #55

microtherion wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been wondering about that as well. It appears he & Vox Day were friends/collaborators and may have shared some political views: https://postcardsfromtheageofreason.com/2026/03/01/bpr1/

good athlete != good person good actor != good person good writer != good person good programmer != good person good person != nice person nice person != talented person TANJ TANSTAAFL SLATFATF

He may have been a bit of a Milkshake Duck

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#64

Post by tkel » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 12:15 AM UTC

tzs wrote: post #58

paulpauper wrote: post #34

I am confused why this goes to a tribute page to a musician when everyone is talking about a software developer?

So far only two linkable reports of his death have been found. The other is on a Twitter-like site that is so full of anti-semite, white nationalist, and similar content and has so little of anything else that it makes Twitter look like a far left hang out. Bradley wrote xv a long time ago and appears to be better known for his later work, including his music. Here's how he described himself on Soundcloud [1]: > Guit…

The current site "voxday" also claims a lot that Trump is "fake" as in, not the real Trump. Odd, I guess that's one of the delusions of the schizophrenic part of the far right?

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#65

Post by trebligdivad » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 12:39 AM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #21

To expand on this a little bit: I had a friend that wanted to scan the cover of his album to start selling copies of it online. This would have been in like 1995 maybe. I went out and bought a HP ScanJet and wrote a command-line program run the scanner and grab that image for him. I started thinking about making a GUI companion to it. I kept thinking "I need to do this like xv does, I need to do that like xv does." I…

I hope you'll keep the fish happy.

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#66

Post by frankwiles » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 12:46 AM UTC

linsomniac wrote: post #21

To expand on this a little bit: I had a friend that wanted to scan the cover of his album to start selling copies of it online. This would have been in like 1995 maybe. I went out and bought a HP ScanJet and wrote a command-line program run the scanner and grab that image for him. I started thinking about making a GUI companion to it. I kept thinking "I need to do this like xv does, I need to do that like xv does." I…

:waves: just saw tummy.com doesn’t resolve anymore. End of an era for sure.

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#67

Post by tomhow » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 12:47 AM UTC

stavros wrote: post #54

tomhow wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We updated the link, thanks!

Why did the title change from "passed away" to "died", do you know? I really don't like the euphemism, so I prefer this one, just wondering.

It's just always been the convention to use that wording on HN, I guess for similar reasons to what you said of your own preference.

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#68

Post by mikestorrent » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

imiric wrote: post #57

mjd wrote: 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…

There's something so appealing about those fvwm window borders, aliased font, crisp graphics, and the simple and intuitive UI of xv. There's nothing jumping at you to get your attention, no ambiguous UI elements and dark patterns, just a well designed and functional GUI. We truly lost something along the way, as modern GUIs are rarely this user friendly.

Wouldn't you love to see that rendered with antialiasing at Retina resolution, but the same on-screen real size as it was back on a 17" 800x600 monitor? I bet it would look delightful.

We have to go back

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#69

Post by mikestorrent » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

mikepurvis wrote: post #6

For others whose Linux experience is almost exclusively on the command line, xv is a desktop image viewer, capable of some basic edits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xv_(software)

Ironically, as Linux makes more inroads on the desktop, traditional Linux desktop software is falling away. A lot of it is still super useful!

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#70

Post by mikestorrent » Fri, Mar 27, 2026, 1:08 AM UTC

protastus wrote: post #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.

30 years later and the basic functionalities of Windows 3.1's File Manager and Word 6.0's object linking and embedding still aren't doable on the web.