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SimpleView - A simple and easy to use slideshow viewer Apps
SimpleView imageThe macosxhints Rating:
10 of 10
[Score: 10 out of 10]
After a few weeks off again (it's amazing what moving two offices into one new one will do to one's schedule), the Pick of the Week returns with a nice, simple application.

This weekend, I wanted a simple slideshow viewer to look at the amazing pictures of the G5 supercomputer cluster at Virginia Tech University. I had dowloaded all of the images from the above mirror site via the brute force method (wget -r http://tartarus.uwa.edu.au/~trs80/Terascale/), and was left with a number of sub-directories, each containing a number of images. While I have several "large" apps that will present slideshows with relative ease (and Preview would work, but it re-orders the images in some seemingly random fashion), I decided to look for a small and "easy on the RAM" tool to do the same thing.

After trying a few from the various Mac download sites, I stubmled on SimpleView. This freeware app has no dock icon, no user interface, and no menubar. You just drag and drop a collection of images on it, and they're presented in a full-screen viewer, one at a time. There are a few controls - previous, next, rotate left/right, delete, show info, enlarge, and you can hit F10 to change the background color and other assorted options. When you're done viewing, just hit Escape and you're back to the desktop.

That's it ... SimpleView is very fast, very easy to use, and perfect for those times when I just want to flip through a folder of images in a hurry.
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SimpleView - A simple and easy to use slideshow viewer | 21 comments | Create New Account
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SimpleView - A simple and easy to use slideshow viewer
Authored by: zeb on Sep 22, '03 12:17:13PM
I got curious after reading this hint and tried wget -r http://tartarus.uwa.edu.au/~trs80/Terascale/ to see the pictures for myself, but I get wget: Command not found. What am I missing?

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..:: Zeb ::..

zebellis.com

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SimpleView - A simple and easy to use slideshow viewer
Authored by: zed on Sep 22, '03 12:19:35PM
Me too...however I did have a linux box which did have wget installed and I used that.. I also note that the URL link is broken. Cheers, ---Zed

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macosx.miraworld.tv

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SimpleView - A simple and easy to use slideshow viewer
Authored by: pete on Sep 22, '03 05:36:53PM
I wish the URL was broken when I blindly pasted this in Terminal! On a slow dial-up, I did not realize this was going to be a rather large and painful download. There doesn't seem to be a switch to turn off whatever wget is getting! I am now stuck with this downloading incessantly. Do I have to delete wget to stop this? Sheesh.

Oh to have high speed!

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SimpleView - A simple and easy to use slideshow viewer
Authored by: diamondsw on Sep 22, '03 06:15:55PM

Control-C is cancel in the UNIX world. Also, Apple mapped "esc" to Control-C.



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SimpleView - A simple and easy to use slideshow viewer
Authored by: pete on Sep 23, '03 09:14:27AM

The problem I found with wget is that once the command was executed, it carried forth on its own, downloading the site without interference in the background. Ctrl-C was attempted to no avail. Re-booting seemed to stop this, but it started up after a few minutes of going back online. Not having a utility to shut down the port it was using, I shut down again. That stopped it - finally.

I did go through a number of pictures that were on the site. Picture after picture of people sitting at a board room table. I just ended up trashing the 20 or so megs of stuff I had downed.



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SimpleView - A simple and easy to use slideshow viewer
Authored by: henry on Sep 22, '03 12:52:00PM
You're missing wget. You could install it through a package manager like fink, or you could use curl instead. I'm not sure what the equivilent curl command would look like - perhaps someone else can interject at this point?

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Deep Vacuum
Authored by: Anonymous on Sep 22, '03 02:03:46PM

There's also a great little freeware app from HexCat called Deep Vacuum. It's basically an OS X GUI wrapper around wget. You can download it from http://www.hexcat.com/deepvacuum/index.htm.



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Deep Vacuum
Authored by: PancakeMan on Sep 22, '03 10:10:08PM
SimpleView - A simple and easy to use slideshow viewer
Authored by: vonleigh on Sep 22, '03 05:26:28PM

Mac OS X doesn't come with wget, however it has curl. Right now the images are offline so I can't check the exact names. If the pictures are numbered, say: picture1.jpg, picture2.jpg, etc. to say picture30.jpg You can use:

curl -O "http://server.com/picture[1-30].jpg"

And it will download all the pictures sequentially.

Read the man page for curl, it has many many options.

v



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SimpleView - A simple and easy to use slideshow viewer
Authored by: henry on Sep 22, '03 12:56:17PM

I've noticed that Preview.app re-orders files too. I'm not sure what ordering system it uses (if any) in 'Icon' and 'List' view modes, but if you set the folder view to 'Columns' then Preview.app should open all the selected files in the expected alphabetical order.



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SimpleView - A simple and easy to use slideshow viewer
Authored by: mzdial on Sep 22, '03 06:57:34PM

10/10 makes it perfect -- Which it's not.

Just noticed that it doesn't recognize EXIF orientation tags. It's not a big deal, but it's something that I would like to see if I was going to use it to preview a folder of images that I just dumped off my DSLR. It's nice to be able to preview portraits and have them in the right direction.

I'll stick to using GraphicConverter's slideshow.. I think GC prefetches the upcoming photo so you don't have a lag when going through the pictures also.



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Nice going Mac OS X hints...
Authored by: acalado on Sep 22, '03 09:10:20PM

I just tried going to the Terascale Cluster web page to view the pics and got this message:

"Terascale Image Access Restricted
Our servers are not able to keep up with the tremendous interest in images of the Terascale Cluster project. For now, we are restricting access to the images to those who connect to the network with a Virginia Tech IP address. We are working on adding additional servers with smaller images in the near future. Please try again after September 24, 2003."

You have unintentionally promoted a denial of service attack by suggesting that people try and download all the images at the same time from the Virginia Tech web site. So many people tried your hint that their servers got overloaded and they were forced to remove public access to the pictures. Way to go and ruin other people's fun...

May I suggest that you consider the repercussions of posting these types of hints. You have a very large readership now and need to consider the potential negative impact your posted hints might have on third party web sites that are mentioned in the hint. I think in this case, people were more interested in the G5 supercomputer cluster project than the shareware you were helping promote...



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Nice going Mac OS X hints...
Authored by: force_quit on Sep 22, '03 10:52:39PM
Slashdot probably had a little more impact...

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Previously trashed...
Authored by: robg on Sep 23, '03 12:04:12AM
The Terracluster image site was Slashdotted all weekend; I wasn't able to see any images until the mirror (http://tartarus.uwa.edu.au/~trs80/Terascale/) was posted. That mirror is, as far as I can tell, still up and working fine.

The link to the main G5 Cluster site from macosxhints won't cause any bandwidth issues for them (it's mainly a text page), especially not compared to what they got from Slashdot on Saturday. The big problem was their image pages; they put up full-size images, and used thumbnails which were simply scaled down via HTML -- so loading a page of 10 preview thumbnails required loading 10 260KB+ image files -- ouch!

In terms of future use of URLs, there's only so much a site can do -- if something is hintworthy and posted to a public server, I'll do my best to check with the site owners if I have time -- but it's not always easy to do, as many times emails to 'webmaster@some_domain.com' go unanswered. Besides, we don't get that much traffic! :)

-rob.

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Previously trashed...
Authored by: acalado on Sep 23, '03 01:56:13AM

Well, Slashdot may have mentioned the site, but it didn't encourage people to suck down the entire library of images all at once now did it? ;-)

I think there is a big difference in bandwidth usage if you are browsing the images one at a time through their web page vs. downloading all 150 in a row. That can add up real quick, especially because judging from the pics they had, most people just browsing them would probably get bored after 10 or 20 pics. the entire library has dozens of hi res images.

I didn't mean to say that you shouldn't post a link to web sites, but if that link is used as an example for a hint (where it doesn't matter what site you use as an example as was the case this time) then you may want to edit out the link and replace it with some generic non-existant site like www.some-web-address.com.

Just my 2ยข worth...



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Previously trashed...
Authored by: Judge Youngwood on Sep 23, '03 02:09:03PM
Actually, the magnitude of the Slashdot Effect is well documented. Mere mention of a site on Slashdot is often enough to overload the server.

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Think b4 p0st...
Authored by: dave1212 on Sep 23, '03 12:07:59AM

That message, which btw I found no sign of while just browsing their G5 image gallery, has nothing to do with the visitors coming from this site compared to the number from Slashdot. (Sorry, Rob) ;)

If you must post like this, please do it in the forums.


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______

[ IE Toolbar Icons, Desktop Picures, Free MP3s ]
http://www.68kmla.ca/



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Think b4 p0st...
Authored by: acalado on Sep 23, '03 02:03:05AM

The problem isn't the number of visitors, it is the amount of data they are requesting. The Slashdot article merely mentions the site exists whereas Max OS X Hints used the web site address as an example which had lots of people trying it just for the sake of trying the command out to see if it works.

Most slashdot readers simply visited the site and browsed the pictures one at a time. Most visitors from this site were probably copying and pasting the Terminal command that was given as an example which had the effect of downloading ALL the images in a short span of time.

In any case, even if this site was not responsible for the site being taken down, my point is still valid. I have a web site with pictures on it and I could just imagine what would have happened to my site if MY web site address was selected for the example. I wouldn't be too pleased.



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Mirror...
Authored by: robg on Sep 23, '03 07:52:52AM
Please read the original hint carefully and check the links and the wget example -- I did not do a wget on the original Virginia Tech site. I did a wget on the full mirror, where the top of the page reads:
This is a mirror of the pictures of the Terascale cluster which is made up of 1,100 PowerMac G5s. The original site was firewalled, apparently due to the Slashdot effect. Bring it on!
Note: The emphasis on "Bring it on!" was not added by me; it's there (still there today) on the original page. Based on that comment, I felt fine posting a wget to the mirror (and it's not like sucking down a site is a big secret -- as others have pointed out, there are quite a few GUI tools that do it more easily than wget or curl).

The only link in the hint that goes to Virigina Tech goes to their main information page, and I hope you're not advocating that I don't post those any more...

-rob.

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SimpleView - A simple and easy to use slideshow viewer
Authored by: gamesman on Sep 23, '03 06:23:23PM
[ObPlugForMyProject]. Take a look at Slideshow for Mac OS X, a really simple GPL'd and functional slideshow viewer. You can find it on Freshmeat, or here. It's a bit buggy, and I don't spend much time on it, but it works for simple stuff. If anybody wants to help on the development, feel free to take a look at the source.

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SimpleView - A simple and easy to use slideshow viewer
Authored by: pooduck on Sep 24, '03 10:19:47AM

I've been looking for a slideshow app that builds on the power of the built-in "Screen Effects / Pictures Folder". I've used this for slideshows primarilly because of it's ability to display a different image on each attached monitor/projector. It can also do a "Ken Burns effect" pan/zoom on each image which really adds life to a presentation. "Hot Corner" activation makes launching a snap. The addition of display speed, transition speed, Keynote-style transitions, and back/forward/pause controls would round out this useful tool nicely.



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