table{width: 100%; border: 1px solid black; background: #bbfefe; padding; 5px}. |NOTE: JustLooking 3.3 has been released. You should really be using that version instead. It’s much cooler!|

I am pleased to announced the immediate availability of JustLooking 1.1. JustLooking is a program to view images and pictures on your Mac OS X-based computer.

NOTE: JustLooking 2.0 has been released. You should really be using that version instead. It’s much cooler!

I pay for my own bandwidth, so please try to use the BitTorrent version of the download if you are able to—it’s a 1.1MB file and takes about 20 seconds.

• Download JustLooking-1.1.0.dmg now. (BitTorrent – TPB)
• Download JustLooking-1.1.0.dmg now. (HTTP)

New For 1.1

I have added a bunch of new features for the 1.1 release, including:

• added support for dragging a folder onto JustLooking. We will open the first file in that folder.
• Left and Right arrow keys navigate images in main window.
• Command + Left or Right arrow now skips a set number of images (controlled via Preferences).
• you can now drag an image from Safari onto JustLooking and it will both save the image to a folder (controlled via Preferences) and display it. (Firefox has a bug and doesn’t “play” OS X correctly, so you can’t drag onto us from there …)
• You can now actually take ownership of unowned file types via new pane in Preferences
• Added more full screen slideshow keystrokes and cool graphics. Keys include:
  • ‘p’ for pause/resume
  • ‘r’ to reverse direction of playing.
  • ‘n’ and ‘b’ for next/back (previous) respectively.
  • space bar now resumes in appropriate direction.
• Completely reworked the Zoom user interface so it doesn’t interfere with the keyboard.
• Added keyboard accelerators for Zoom:
  • CMD+1 = 100%
  • CMD+2 = 200%
  • CMD+3 = Fit to Window
  • CMD+4 = Other…
• Fixed a couple of animated GIF problems. There is still a problem with transparency which will be the first thing fixed for the next version.
• You can now show or hide the toolbar at the bottom of the main window.
• Massive improvements to many of the existing localisations and new Russian and Finnish translations! Awesome!

There are a few features I had hoped to get into 1.1, including the ability to go straight to full-screen mode and some tweaking that will get into the next version. Thanks to everybody who has suggested features thus far.

Introduction

Welcome to JustLooking, an image viewing program for Mac OS X. JustLooking is designed to be a replacment for the “Preview” application on your computer for browsing images. In particular, it has the following differences:

• It focuses on files and directories instead of lists of files. Thus, once you load a file, you can easily navigate through all other files in the same directory.
• It displays images at their native resolution instead of interpreting DPI information stored in the image meta-data. While images are printed at the maximum resolution possible, on screen they are displayed pixel-by-pixel.
• Being designed more for viewing of Images, it properly shows animated GIF files.
• The entire program can easily be manipulated and powered by simple keystrokes for a quick and pleasant viewing experience.
• JustLooking also supports such basic features as printing and rotating and will hopefully prove to be sufficiently functional for most users’ needs.

It should be noted that the application is not designed to completely replace Preview, as there are a number of features in the latter that JustLooking simply does not have, such as selecting and copying regions, saving images in various formats, and viewing of Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files.

Requirements and Installation

Running JustLooking is quite simple, and the only requirements are:

• Mac OS X 10.4 or greater
• 256MB RAM
• 2MB free disk space

JustLooking is installed on any new machine by simply dragging it into the Applications folder.

Credits

JustLooking was designed, written, and partially localised (French, Italian, German, Spanish, and some Chinese) by Marc Wandschneider here in Beijing over a couple of casual months. I sat down to write it as a replacement for Preview, as I found the latter to rarely operate in a way that I wanted it to. I tend to keep directories full of images, whether they be traveling, family, or junk I collect from the Intarwebs.

Finder and Preview rarely let me select and view more than a couple hundred of images at a time, and I have large numbers of folders with more files than that.

The following people have helped with Localisation of JustLooking:

• German – Stefanie Schau
• French – Laurent Molina
• Italian – Roberto Bellina
• Spanish – Carola Clavo
• Russian – Sergey Melnik
• Finnish – Markus Peltomäki

Sadly, the Chinese localisation has atrophied to the point of being useless, and I have temporarily removed it—my Chinese is just not good enough yet. i’m hoping to get either it back soon, and maybe even a Japanese version some day!

Help us Out

Speak a language that isn’t in the list of currently localised languages? See some mistakes in the current translation for a particular language? If you’d like to help or offer corrections, I’d love the help. The more languages, the better!!

Coming Up

I’m thinking of adding the following features in future versions.

• Re-vamped UI—Some users have been making some suggestions for UI improvements, and I am extremely interested in these.0
• Image scaling improvements—Currently, image scaling and resizing is done in memory and not on the video card at render time. This will be the first thing fixed in the next version.
• Info Dialogs—Support for viewing (editing?) the meta-data associated with those image file formats that support this.
• Saving of rotated images—This will also require support for properly rotating JPEG images without introducing new artifacting and further destroying data.

I’d love to hear if users have any suggestions. Feel free to contact me with any features you’d like to see!