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.
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.
That control panel was really great! Particularly for scanning, it was nice to be able to adjust some of the color curves slightly to correct the scanned image.
However, one thing I REALLY used that control panel for was greyscale images, you could adjust the curve so that things that were barely legible in the image suddenly popped way out. Almost like that trick of rubbing a pencil across a blank page to reveal what someone wrote on the page above it. Or smaller adjustments just to make a greyscale more uniform.
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 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.
Even though I hadn't thought about xv in decades, as soon as I read the headline, the image of those 3d buttons with the crisp outlines resurfaced from my memory.
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.
The entirety of the works of Fabrice Bellard. QEMU and FFmpeg are the most well-known ones, but there's also a full blown x86 emulator fully and exclusively written in native JavaScript, a greenfield image compression format, a JS engine and probably a dozen other things I only randomly stumble upon and think "oh, wtf, another Fabrice Bellard thing?".
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.
saw a screenshot as I was reading this article, made me eager to try it, and it's indeed simple, slick and featured... elegant look and feel for a different age.
Originally I posted a link to a gab article that extensively discussed the software developer side of John as well as the musician side, but it has been decided to replace it with a link that only mentions the musician side.
As much as anybody these days, since tummy.com shut down 3-5 years ago. I left a dozen years ago. I'm the one that wrote the scanning extensions to xv that were mentioned in the posted article. Evelyn and I were co-owners for the first ~22 years.
Link has since been replaced and I didn't catch the gab link, but yikes, the new site is also filled with conspiracy peddling [1] and, even worse, blatant Russia apologetism [2].
Maybe. While the vox link is referenced in the page I posted, the vox link provides way, way less flavor than the posted link. Including, notably, the vox link has no mention of Xv.
To expand on this a little bit:
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.
Wonderful share, thanks
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.
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)
>a control panel
That control panel was really great! Particularly for scanning, it was nice to be able to adjust some of the color curves slightly to correct the scanned image.
However, one thing I REALLY used that control panel for was greyscale images, you could adjust the curve so that things that were barely legible in the image suddenly popped way out. Almost like that trick of rubbing a pencil across a blank page to reveal what someone wrote on the page above it. Or smaller adjustments just to make a greyscale more uniform.
That was really one of xv's superpowers.
The last time that I checked, XV was still in the OpenBSD ports collection. It fits well with fvwm.
I actually bought a license for XV, and I have the manual.
For others whose Linux experience is almost exclusively on the command line, xv is a desktop image viewer, capable of some basic edits:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xv_(software)
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.
He was still accepting shareware payment for it on his website, which I think is amazing... https://xv.trilon.com/
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.
Even though I hadn't thought about xv in decades, as soon as I read the headline, the image of those 3d buttons with the crisp outlines resurfaced from my memory.
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.
Sometimes you see credits and say "Oh, wow, I didn't know that they were involved with that!?"
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.
> Perhaps some of you have other examples.
The entirety of the works of Fabrice Bellard. QEMU and FFmpeg are the most well-known ones, but there's also a full blown x86 emulator fully and exclusively written in native JavaScript, a greenfield image compression format, a JS engine and probably a dozen other things I only randomly stumble upon and think "oh, wtf, another Fabrice Bellard thing?".
I can't even imagine being able to think like he can.
Xv! A true blast from the past. A much unappreciated piece of software
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.
I was blown away when I discovered xv in the early 90's. Coming from Deluxe Paint and Photon Paint, I was very impressed.
The original link of this thread was to: https://gab.com/markofafreeman/posts/116290669616400528
xv was very neatly and cleverly designed. I liked it a lot in the 90s. Still somehow remember his name.
saw a screenshot as I was reading this article, made me eager to try it, and it's indeed simple, slick and featured... elegant look and feel for a different age.
Here's two screenshots:
https://snapcraft.io/xv
I am confused why this goes to a tribute page to a musician when everyone is talking about a software developer?
Originally I posted a link to a gab article that extensively discussed the software developer side of John as well as the musician side, but it has been decided to replace it with a link that only mentions the musician side.
Most people are more than one person.
There is a mention of tummy.com and a man, but it is owned by Evelyn Mitchell.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/evelynmitchell/
I am that man at the Usenix conference.
Cool, are you related to tummy then? I'm just trying to clear up my own confusion.
As much as anybody these days, since tummy.com shut down 3-5 years ago. I left a dozen years ago. I'm the one that wrote the scanning extensions to xv that were mentioned in the posted article. Evelyn and I were co-owners for the first ~22 years.
Oh wow, thanks for the context and your work!
ciao John!
I made the massive mistake of scrolling down - something vile and worse than X.
Yeah, we should not be linking to gab and its ilk here.
Link has since been replaced and I didn't catch the gab link, but yikes, the new site is also filled with conspiracy peddling [1] and, even worse, blatant Russia apologetism [2].
[1] https://voxday.net/tag/immigration/
[2] https://voxday.net/tag/russia/
Vox Day may be a familiar name to folks who were paying attention to the SF / fantasy world tenish years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Day
https://voxday.net/2026/03/25/rip-john-bradley/
We updated the link, thanks!
RIP.
This should be the main link, we should replace this link instead of the Gab one.
I'm not sure replacing Gab with Vox Day is much of an improvement!
Anything better than Gab is fine.
Maybe. While the vox link is referenced in the page I posted, the vox link provides way, way less flavor than the posted link. Including, notably, the vox link has no mention of Xv.
The flavor in the Gab articles after your post was enough to sour the whole meal.
long time lurker, but yeah I didn't need to experience that hatred on my eyeballs
going to go pet the cat for 25 minutes