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I spend a lot of time talking to Jon and various other characters on IRC when I should probably be working. During the course of the day, there tends to be a lot of URLs passed back and forth. Often it's a pain in the ass to cut and paste them from putty into a web browser, due to the prevalence of ludicrously long URLs and absolutely gratuitous hostnames on the modern internet. It's the ones that get broken across multiple lines that suck the most.

In the tried and true tradition of doing-work-now-so-you-can-be-lazy-later, Jon wrote a bot called curmudgeon that sucks URLs (and sometimes URL-like text) out of IRC and puts them on a web page. I convinced him to add some code so that the URLs get thrown into a database. Today, motivated by profound boredom, I wrote a front-end for that database. Here it is.

Four albums that I've been listening to quite a bit this week:
John Vanderslice - Cellar Door
Modest Mouse - Good News For People Who Love Bad News
Jem - Finally Woken
Death Cab For Cutie - Transatlanticism

James just put up his proto-blog. It looks awesome.

Features and bugfixes:
-Source project now uses Xcode
-Fullscreen viewing has been rewritten to be volume control/brightness control/exposé friendly.
-Flashing when returning from fullscreen has been reduced.
-Weird issue with nonfunctional arrow keys seems to be resolved
-Menu option to disable automatic resizing (from Eli Cash).
-Escape now exits from fullscreen mode.

Download:
Binary: MagicLantern-1.0.1.zip
Source: MagicLantern-1.0.1_source.zip

The source is now available via anonymous CVS from:
strangecargo.org:/var/lib/cvs
The CVS project is called "MagicLantern".

Magic Lantern is an image viewer I wrote because I was just a little frustrated with the available image viewing programs for OS X. All the ones I could find were (pick and choose here) horribly out of date, slow, and/or commercial/shareware. It's very simple; all I wanted was a quickish program that lets you browse through directories.

I had originally intended to make Magic Lantern available via strangecargo, but I haven't put together a web page for it yet, and all attempts at convincing Larry to do it have failed. For now, I'm posting it here so I can start to get feedback and bug reports/feature requests. Magic Lantern is distributed under the terms of the GPL.

Executable: MagicLantern-1.0.dmg
Source Code: MagicLantern-1.0_source.dmg

The controls are as follows:

down arrow/right arrow: next image in directory
up arrow/left arrow: previous image in directory
page down: skip forward 5 images
page up: skip back 5 images
home: go to first image in directory
end: go to last image in directory
command-F: toggles in and out of full-screen mode
I and command I: toggles filename display in full-screen mode

I'm currently working on more customizable preferences and some bugs, but it's usable/stable enough that I use it as my default program for opening jpg/png/gif/etc files. Features in the pipeline include: resize behaviour preferences, a more appropriate icon, and perhaps XML-RPC integration with a web-based image management library that I'm working on (hopefully, more on that later).

If you're wondering, the name is derived from the name of a device not unlike a slide projector from the early days of photography.

The Magic Lantern icon, "100,000 Fireflies," is distributed with the gracious permission of Matthew Bice of IheartNY.com.

Please ask for features and bugfixes in the comments.

Send patches to me at <allan at counterpop dot net>