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John Bradley, author of xv, has died

voxday.net

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Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#91

Post by somat »

fullstop wrote: post #32

Sometimes you see credits and say "Oh, wow, I didn't know that they were involved with that!?" For John Bradley, it is xv and xcalc. For Hisham Muhammad it is htop and LuaRocks. And for Jason Donenfeld it is wireguard and cgit. Perhaps some of you have other examples.

Oh xcalc. My favorite xcalc hack is that every single button is an x11 window and you can reparent other windows into them.

    xwininfo -tree
    xdotool windowreparent 0x1e0000b 0x2c0001d
great fun at parties

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#92

Post by somat »

mikestorrent wrote: post #70
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.

I mean, you are right, but....

It's the web, it's not supposed to get local files it gets web files and we don't ole for a reason. microsoft tried that with IE(activeX) and found out the hard way. but despite that it does a pretty good job linking and embedding javascript. to the point that they had to invent the whole CORS lunacy just to slow it down.

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#93

Post by fooqux »

imiric wrote: post #61
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 ecosys…

The spirit of it seems to live on in a few examples, such as Immich and the other software by Futo.

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#94

Post by mikepurvis »

anthk wrote: post #87
mikestorrent wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Imagemagick and GraphicsMagick have a GUI with the 'display' program which can do tons of things XV did in a libre way.

One small joy in switching back to Windows after almost two decades of Mac OS was getting to have Irfanview again.

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#96

Post by jnpnj »

em-bee wrote: post #46
jnpnj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

saw a screenshot as I was reading this article, made me eager to try it, and it's indeed simple, slick and featured... elegant look and feel for a different age.

you can try it. a few years ago some people picked up maintenance: https://github.com/jasper-software/xv i just built it on my machine. works!

it's available on arch aur too, a quick build away and ready to serve

Re: John Bradley, author of xv, has died

#97

Post by _elcoyote »

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…

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