81–90 of 97 posts
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Eww. Too bad interesting news comes from such a vile source. (This is the message below that as I write this: https://gab.com/disco/posts/116293438874138531 )
Vox Day isn't any better
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.
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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
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.
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 p…
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!
I still use xv today when I want to print out a map on a black and white printer. It's quick to click print, greyscale, and max to shrink to fit to a sheet of paper.
I think it was during the 1997 Soujourner Mars rover NASA mission that on the first day NASA showed a pic from Mars and they used xv. It said unregistered and someone got NASA to register their copy. That always made me smile to see xv on TV
RIP John, you gave us a great piece of software that is still useful over 30 years later.
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…
fyi Affinity Photo has recolor and hue filters that will do just that.
I used it for my video game art.
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)
https://dav.lbl.gov/archive/NERSC/Software/xv/help/xvdocs.pd...
I think the "Miscellaneous Ramblings" on the final page really illustrates the color of his personality:
Section 13.3: Miscellaneous Ramblings
And, of course, thanks to everyone else. If you contributed to the developement of xv in some way, and I somehow forgot to put you in the big list, my humble apologies. Documentation and careful record- keeping are not my strong suits. “Heck,” why do you think it takes me a year and a half to come up with a minor new release? Because, while I love to add new features to the code, I dread documenting the dumb things. Besides, we all know that writing the documentation is the hardest part of any program. Particularly when the good folks at id Software insisted upon releasing DOOM II...
And finally, thanks to all the folks who’ve written in from hundreds of sites world-wide. You’re the ones who’ve made xv a real success. (Well, that’s not actually true. My love of nifty user-interfaces, all the wonderful code I’ve gotten from the folks listed above, and the fact that xv actually serves a useful purpose (albeit “displaying pictures of naked women”) are the things that have made xv a real success. You folks who’ve written in have given me a way to measure how successful xv is.) But I digress. Thanks!
By the way, when I last counted (in October 1992), xv was in use at 180 different Universities, and dozens of businesses, goverment agencies, and the like, in 27 countries on 6 of the 7 continents. Since then, I’ve received messages from hundreds of new sites. And xv has been spotted in Antartica, bringing the total to 7 of 7 continents, and allowing me to claim that xv is, in fact, truly global software. That’s probably a good thing. Does anybody know if there’s a Unix workstation in the Space Shuttle?... :-)