KuickShow for KDE 2.1

Many of you have been waiting for this one. Carsten Pfeiffer wrote in to tell us about the first release of KuickShow since KDE 1.1.2 in July 1999. KuickShow is a nice image viewer based on Rasterman's Imlib, and in case you don't remember, the killer feature of KuickShow was its blazing speed. You won't be disappointed by the latest release for KDE 2.1 -- I was blown away. It's even noticeably faster than the venerable XV (hint: command line geeks should use KDE Init for that extra speed boost, others benefit automatically). You can get KuickShow here, view a couple screenshots (1, 2, 3), or view the ChangeLog. Depending on your feedback, binary RPMs may soon be made available. Read on for the details from Carsten.

Carsten Pfeiffer writes:

Some of you might remember an ancient program called KuickShow, a nice and very fast imageviewer for KDE1, last released in July '99. Due to other projects, the significant changes from KDE 1.x to 2.x, and a rewrite of KuickShow internals, the new version has been delayed until now.

At least Imlib didn't change. :) Yes, KuickShow uses Imlib to load and display images, and that's one of the reasons for KuickShow being so fast. It also supports a lot of image formats, even some Photoshop *.psd files work.

The new KuickShow 0.8 works pretty much the same as the last version. You have a filebrowser to select the images to display. But IMHO, the best way to browse image galleries is to open an image, hit Return to toggle into fullscreen mode and then press PageUp/Down/Home/End to navigate between images. This is all amazingly fast, of course, have I mention that, yet? :) You say you won't download anything before you've seen a screenshot? I wouldn't either, so here they are.

Now if you want to view images kuickly, here's what you need:

Requirements:

• kdelibs 2.1 (2.0 won't work)
• Qt >= 2.2.3
• Imlib (together with libjpeg, libpng, libgif/libungif, libtiff)

Oh and don't forget KuickShow! Currently there is only a tarball and source-rpm (use --prefix=/where/your/kde/is/installed unless your KDE lives in /opt/kde2) available.

I'd like to get some feedback about this version and will try to get some binary RPMs ready if nothing serious needs to be fixed.

If you used the old KuickShow for KDE1, you might stumble over a couple of things:

• the ".." entry in the filebrowser that took you into the parent directory is no longer available. Just as in the filedialog or in Konqueror, use Alt+Up (or the toolbar button) to change into the parent dir.
• the change-directory shortcut & menu entry was removed. Simply start typing a filename or a directory name in the fileview. A small editfield will pop up to assist you.

Of course this is all mentioned in the documentation, but I'm betting that nobody's going to read that ;)

Thanks,
Carsten