Digital Home Thoughts: VJPEG - Fast, Free JPEG Viewer With an Interesting Twist

"I realized I was spending a lot of time waiting for JPEGs to open, and the default viewer on my system wasn't really hot with large files. I take a lot of digital camera pictures, and viewing a few megapixels in a web browser is ugly. I have a good bicubic resampler that I use for various things, and so I made a JPEG viewer that uses it to show pictures when you double-click them. It makes them small, to start. The idea here is "images as objects" so once they're open, you drag them around the screen by clicking and dragging. That's it. If you push them against the top or left edge of the screen, they "stick" for a while and resize to stay on the screen (that means you get live zooming.)"



This is a sweet little app. When I want to open a JPEG file, that's all I want to do - just look at it. So many viewers have "evolved" (I use that term sarcastically) into adding more features that we really need. Heck, if the built-in Windows XP viewer went border to border full-screen, it would be enough for most people. Myself, I'm sold on ACDSEE, but if you're just looking for a fast, free JPEG/GIF/BMP viewer, this is worth checking out.

The rest of the site is interesting as well, especially if you're a developer - lots of great tips. I originally found a link to this site in the Picasa forums, and based on what I read about his approach to developing, he's a developer who works on Picasa. I found his analysis of Windows XP to be quite interesting as well. I haven't spent this much time on a developer's site since visiting AnaogX. :D