alt Hacker NewsJohn Bradley, author of xv, has died
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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)
I mostly learned programming GUI applications, in Xwindow and in general, studying the code of xv. The GUI controls were written from scratch using X resources and the code quality was top notch. I remember printing the full source code back in the winter break of 1994 at my university printers since I was going on vacations with my family and I was going to be completely disconnected. I studied the code writing side notes every time I had a moment to relax. Good times. Many thanks, John.
For others whose Linux experience is almost exclusively on the command line, xv is a desktop image viewer, capable of some basic edits:
Folks talk about xv in the past tense. I still use it. On AWS it is still a great way for me to view images on headless ECS instances using an X11 server on my Mac. I still use on my local Linux boxes because it has image editing features I still can not find elsewhere.
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.
I still use xv daily. I paid the sharewire price back in the day (I think it was $25), and the license, if I recall correctly, was a photo of John with a thumbs-up. I've added a few patches here and there to deal with slightly more modern jpeg features and the like, and for the most part it handles everything I want to do, and the rest I do with imagemagick. For just looking at images I use xv all the time. Fast, and with some editing options as others have mentioned.
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.
I really liked the widget set (custom made for the program) that xv used. In the 1990s it looked far more "professional" than most GUI apps on Linux/Unix in general.
He was still accepting shareware payment for it on his website, which I think is amazing... https://xv.trilon.com/
Xv! A true blast from the past. A much unappreciated piece of software
I was blown away when I discovered xv in the early 90's. Coming from Deluxe Paint and Photon Paint, I was very impressed.
xv was fast, stable, had a good interface, and useful far beyond the normal lifespan of such a piece of software. Used it all the time in the early 90s.
xv was very neatly and cleverly designed. I liked it a lot in the 90s. Still somehow remember his name.
visual schnauzer
I am confused why this goes to a tribute page to a musician when everyone is talking about a software developer?
There is a mention of tummy.com and a man, but it is owned by Evelyn Mitchell.
The original link of this thread was to: https://gab.com/markofafreeman/posts/116290669616400528
I made the massive mistake of scrolling down - something vile and worse than X.
ciao John!
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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 finally realized: What if I just added a scanning screen to Xv? But because of the license, I couldn't just release it as open source.
I contacted John Bradley, thinking it was probably a long shot that he'd answer. But he did, and he accepted my idea: I'd sell xv with scanning for $50, and send him half. Real nice guy, though the majority of our interaction was me just sending him periodic checks.
I had a domain, tummy.com, because it was a fun name for a fat guy, and when I registered the domain my provider (back in the early '90s) wouldn't let me register a .org unless I was a non profit org, so I went with .com. Because of this deal with John Bradley, I registered tummy.com as an LLC to start selling this software. Over around a decade, I sent John well into the 5 digits of licensing fees. Mostly it was one-offs, but there were a few organizations where it was handfulls of copies for their site.
I had done that software in the evenings while I did a contracting gig at the Telco (USWest). When that contract was up, I was tired of working for a giant company, so I wanted to start doing Linux sys admin consulting. So I started doing that under the tummy.com brand. Did that for around 20 years until around a dozen years ago.
RIP John Bradley.