what’s the best pictureviewer for xp/vista?

First, a bit of history:

before XP, I used acdsee on win98/win2000/nt but the person who developed this thought it was a good idea to put tons of useless features into it without thinking about the fact that an application needs a intuative userinterface, and then decided that it also needed nagscreens, banners and other irritations. So goodbye acdsee. This frankenstein is killed some time ago by it’s creator and now lives on as a zombie.

On XP i’ve been using the standard windows picture viewer, which is simple and good. It shows all my snapshots and allows me to browse and print them. In combination with explorer, you hardly need anything else.

But what about the other popular formats, most importantly png and psd (photoshop) files. Because microsoft does not seem to like them they are not supported by the standard XP viewer. And then you might want to do some simple editing, like rescale or contrast correction on a few pictures. At that moment, you realize thet you need an alternative.

Well, vista finally arrived. And with it came the brand new photo gallery and solved all my problems…not. Although png file support is ok, psd files (from microsofts big enemy adobe) is still not supported, and the edit possibilities are still minimal.

Then i tried picasa, but that is not a picture viewer, it is a digital photo album.

so my wishlist was as follows:
– at least jpg, gif, png and psd format support.
– some simple editing options,
like scale, crop, contrast/hue/brightness, rotation, flip
– a real picture viewer with explorer-like file management.

In comes irfanview. This seems like a decent picturemanager, but it has a lot of drawbacks. First, the brain of the developer and my brain seem to be so different, that nearly all defaults are wrong. If you click on something, it always does NOT do what you want.
Example: the save-floppy icon is save-as, not save as you expect. Also, try to get the picture scaled to the window automatically, but keep its ratio. This should be the default setting, but in irfanview you need 20 minutes to figure out how to do this.
Then, try to edit a picture. You need to wade through hundreds of options, none are relevant until you find out it can not do what you want.
Finaly, irfanview is incredibly slow. The XP standard viewer shows pictures on avarage 50x faster than irfanview.
Conclusion: irfanview is bloatware that needs a serious rewrite. Its an application only a mother could love.

Googling for alternatives i came across firegraphic, paperstore, thumbsplus, compupic..

Then I found xnview. XnView is a better viewer in all aspects than irfanview or acdsee. It has a better userinterface, has a lot of options and features, and they are placed in the way you would expect them, its very fast and supports a lot of fileformats. A big advantage is it’s browser screen which has a good explorer-like feel. And it’s free.
The main disadvantage is that it also tries to implent too many features and options, but it does not become completly unusable, and the defaults are well chosen. Furthermore it does not have a modern userinterface like picasa.

What is it that picture viewer developers seem to think that the number of features is more important than the usability? Do we need to wait for windows7 before we get a decent picture viewer/editor in windows? Or is there a viewer that can do simple editing and is fast and passes some simple usability criteria?


Flash memory reliability

During my trip to China a few weeks ago I met Ernst Fuld again. Ernst is CEO of the NGN, the dutch IT-professional platform. He told me that he has tried to test some usb-sticks and see if they could be written and erased so many times that they break. As you probably know, flash memory can only be written a limited number of times. Each time you erase (rewrite) the memory cell, there is a slight chance that it breaks. Normally, the memory is guaranteed to last for 100000 rewrites, but has anybody tested this on a regular usb stick?

There is a problem however. The sticks are known to use a technique called “wear levelling”. The data you write to the stick is remapped to memory area’s where the number of rewrites is the lowest. This means that you cannot test 1 cell by re-writing a small file over and over. You have to fill the WHOLE stick in order to rewrite all cells. And even if you manage to break a cell, there is also error-correction logic and bad-block remapping that will correct the error without notice. So the flash memories seem to be unbreakable.. or not!?

That’s why I wrote this simple app: Flashkiller. It’s a free download so you can test the reliability of your memory stick yourself. If you broke a usb-stick or memory card with it, please respond to this post!

May 2 update: the kingston 512mb is now @19000 rewrites and still without an error..

june 13 update: The kingston is DEAD. After 65000 writes it becomes a read-only stick. Nothing can be written any more, and when i try to write it gives an error!!!!


Een office in china?

Dit lijkt moeilijker dan dat het is. Als eerste natuurlijk de keuze van de plaats. Na ons bezoek aan Shanghai werd wel duidelijk dat het daar lastiger gaat worden: de stad is overvol, de lonen stijgen en de chinezen zijn nu vooral zelf heel ondernemend en hebben in steeds mindere mate de buitenlanders nodig. Neem dan Chengdu, de tweede stad waar we een kijkje namen. Chengdu is een van de 2nd-tier steden in China, waar op dit ogenblik de overheid hard de economische ontwikkeling aan het promoten is. En die promotie gaat samen met een mooie welkomst speech tijdens ons bezoek aan de High Tech Zone door een vertegenwoordiger van het gestaalde kader: volledig in het chinees. Gelukkig wordt de speech daarna dunnetjes overgedaan door een goed engels sprekende man die ons uitlegt wat de mogelijkheden zijn.

Continue Reading


the IE6 to IE7 upgrade

I’m using firefox as my default browser, but for testing and development i need explorer every once in a while. A couple of weeks ago, my microsoft update asked my to upgrate to IE7. So why not? well, always reluctant to install microsoft stuff, but if everybody uses IE7, i should at least test websites for this new browser.

So i installed IE7. What a bummer! I got an icon, but that was about it. Clicking the IE7 icon shows the hourglass for a fraction of a second, and then it exits immediately. So i uninstalled it and installed it again. Nope.. Then I reinstalled IE6. Works fine! Continue Reading