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?... :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
31 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 63.7 ms ] threadhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/evelynmitchell/
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?... :-)
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)
fyi Affinity Photo has recolor and hue filters that will do just that.
I used it for my video game art.
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.
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.
RIP John.