Thanks go out to the following wonderful folks:
First and foremost, John Hagan, best friend, lead beta-tester, and guy who got me a new job. He's been the driving force behind much of xv. Nearly all the major differences between the xv that you see today, and the xgif of four (five? six?) years ago can be traced to the years of continual harassment because of alleged (and actual) weaknesses in xgif. xv probably never would've been written, were it not for his input. Many of the features in the code were his idea. For example, he'd been asking for a Visual Schnauzer for years now...
Filip Fuma, my former boss, deserves a great deal of thanks for seeing the value of xv, and allowing, (if not actually encouraging) me to write it. I also owe him an eternal debt of gratitude (if not actual money) for being the genius who said "You know, you should make this into shareware..."
Helen Anderson has provided many fine ideas over the years, and has continued to be amused by xv for much of that time, more than I can occasionally say for myself. She also proofread the 2.20 version of this document, much of which remains verbatim.
Patrick J. Naughton ([email protected]) provided 'gif2ras.c', a program that converts GIF files to Sun Rasterfiles. This program provided the basis for the original xgif, which eventually grew into xv. As such, it would be safe to say that he "started it all." This code, now somewhat modified, is still in use in the module xvgif.c.
Michael Mauldin ([email protected]) provided a short, understandable version of the GIF writing code. This code, essentially unmodified, is in the module xvgifwr.c .
Dave Heath ([email protected]) provided the Sun Rasterfile i/o support in the module xvsunras.c . Ken Rossman ([email protected]) fixed it up somewhat.
Tom Lane ([email protected]), for much advice and assistance on 24->8 bit quantization, color allocation, and, of course, JPEG issues.
Of course, many thanks go out to Tom and all the rest of the folks in the Independent JPEG Group for providing a freely-distributable version of the JPEG software, thereby providing the rest of us with the new standard graphics format (replacing GIF).
Sam Leffler ([email protected]) has not only come up with a freely-distributable library for doing TIFF file i/o (the libtiff package), but also wrote the xv interface modules xvtiff.c and xvtiffwr.c . Thanks Sam!
Paul Haeberli ([email protected]) provided me with nice clean, portable code to read and write IRIS 'rgb' files.
Jef Poskanzer ([email protected]) is responsible for coming up with several cool/whizzo general image formats (pbm, pgm, ppm), and a package of programs for image manipulation and format conversion. Part of this code has been snarfed and incorporated into xv in the form of the -best24 algorithm and the XWD format support.
Rick Dyson ([email protected]) has been doing the VMS ports of xv for the past couple years now. All you VMS users owe him a great big "Thank you," because you wouldn't have xv if it weren't for his efforts. I won't go near a VMS system. Rick also gets a "Thanks" from me for doing a good deal of beta-testing, as well.
David Elliot ([email protected]) gets a special thanks for being the guy who has submitted more bug fixes and feature requests than anybody else. You'd almost think he has more time to work on xv than I do!
Bernie McIlroy ([email protected]) for providing me with information on the BMP format. (Which is included in the docs subdirectory, so please don't bother him!)
Anthony Datri ([email protected]) for writing the PDS/VICAR i/o module.
Thomas Meyer ([email protected]) for writing the IFF i/o module.
Chris Ross ([email protected]), for writing the XPM i/o module, and in the process, inadvertently making me think about a great number of things...
David Robinson ([email protected]) for writing the FITS i/o module.
The following folks have all contributed to the development of xv in the form of bug reports, bug fixes, patches, support for additional systems, and/or good ideas. See the CHANGELOG file for specifics:
Jimmy Aitken ([email protected])
Satoshi Asami ([email protected])
Leon Avery ([email protected])
Tim Ayers ([email protected])
Bill Barabash ([email protected])
Markus Baur ([email protected])
Jason Berri ([email protected])
Richard Bingle ([email protected])
Alan Blanchard ([email protected])
Bob Boag ([email protected])
David Boulware ([email protected])
Thomas Braeunl ([email protected])
Jon Brinkmann ([email protected])
Andrew Brooks ([email protected])
David Brooks ([email protected])
Kevin Brown ([email protected])
Elaine Chen ([email protected])
Jeff Coffler ([email protected])
Reg Clemens ([email protected])
Paul Close ([email protected])
David A. Clunie ([email protected])
Jan D. ([email protected])
Anthony Datri ([email protected])
Berthold Dettlaff ([email protected])
L. Peter Deutsch ([email protected])
Derek Dongray ([email protected])
Rick Dyson ([email protected])
Dean Elhard ([email protected])
David Elliot ([email protected])
Scott Erickson ([email protected])
Stefan Esser ([email protected])
Bob Finch ([email protected])
Robert Forsman ([email protected])
Peter Glassenbury ([email protected])
Michael Gleicher ([email protected])
Robert Goodwill ([email protected])
Dave Gregorich ([email protected]) Brian Gregory ([email protected])
Ted Grzesik ([email protected])
Harald Hanche-Olsen ([email protected])
Charles Hannum ([email protected])
Dave Heath ([email protected])
Scott D. Heavner ([email protected])
Bill Hess ([email protected])
Dave Hill ([email protected])
Tom Hinds ([email protected])
Ricky KeangPo Ho ([email protected])
Mark Horstman ([email protected])
Tetsuya Ikeda ([email protected])
Yasuhiro Imoto ([email protected])
Lester Ingber ([email protected])
Dana Jacobsen ([email protected])
Roy Johnson ([email protected])
Dave Jones ([email protected])
Kjetil Jorgensen ([email protected])
Jonathan Kamens ([email protected])
Vivek Khera ([email protected])
Tero Kivinen ([email protected])
Rainer Klute ([email protected])
Marc Kossa ([email protected])
Bill Kucharski ([email protected])
( Bruce Labow ([email protected])
Dave Lampe ([email protected])
Tom Lane ([email protected])
Peder Langlo ([email protected])
Jeremy Lawrence ([email protected])
Sam Leffer ([email protected])
Jim Lick ([email protected])
Jean Liddle ([email protected])
Michael Lipscomb ([email protected])
Eam Lo ([email protected])
Rolf Mayer ([email protected])
Stephen Mautner ([email protected])
Tom McConnel ([email protected])
Craig McGregor ([email protected])
Thomas Meyer ([email protected])
Peter Miller ([email protected])
Erwan Moysan ([email protected])
Chris Newman ([email protected])
Lars Bo Nielsen ([email protected])
James Nugent ([email protected])
Arthur Olson ([email protected])
Machael Pall ([email protected])
Mike Patnode ([email protected])
Nigel Pearson ([email protected])
Joe Peterson ([email protected])
Colin Plumb ([email protected])
Daniel Pommert ([email protected])
Robert Potter ([email protected])
Werner Randolf ([email protected])
Eric Raymond ([email protected])
Eric Rescorla ([email protected])
Phil Richards ([email protected])
Declan A. Rieb ([email protected])
David Robinson ([email protected])
R. P. Rodgers ([email protected])
Chris P. Ross ([email protected])
Eckhard Rueggeberg ([email protected])
Arvind Sabharwal ([email protected])
Hitoshi Saji ([email protected])
Nick Sayer ([email protected])
Klaus Schnepper ([email protected])
Steven Schoch ([email protected])
Bill Silvert ([email protected])
Ben Simons ([email protected])
Cameron Simpson ([email protected])
Mark Snitily ([email protected])
Karsten Spang ([email protected])
Greg Spencer ([email protected])
Matthew Stier ([email protected])
Andreas Stolcke ([email protected])
Rod Summers ([email protected])
Steve Swales ([email protected])
Tony Sweeney ([email protected])
Matt Thomas ([email protected])
Rich Thomson ([email protected])
Bill Turner ([email protected])
Larry W. Virden ([email protected])
John Walker ([email protected])
Doug Washburn ([email protected])
Drew Watson ([email protected])
Chris Weikart ([email protected])
Michael Weller ([email protected])
Kenny Zalewski ([email protected])
Jamie Zawinski ([email protected])
Dan Zheme ([email protected])
Eric Demerling (AIX)
Rick Dyson (VAX VMS, VMS on Alpha, SunOS)
Tom Lane (HP systems)
Sam Leffler (SGI systems)
Chris Ross (Solaris, SunOS, Ultrix, NetBSD)
Michael Weller (Linux)
Me (OSF/1, SunOS)
Thanks to these folks we can be pretty sure that xv will at least compile cleanly on the vast majority of systems. Any bugs that have slipped through are entirely my fault, as, in all fairness, I haven't given these guys much time to test it. As such, the only platform that I can say xv has been seriously tested on is OSF/1 running on a DEC Alpha, as that's been my most recent development environment.
And, of course, thanks to everyone else. If you contributed to the developement of xv in some way, and I somehow forgot to put you in the big list, my humble apologies. Documentation and careful record- keeping are not my strong suits. "Heck," why do you think it takes me a year and a half to come up with a minor new release? Because, while I love to add new features to the code, I dread documenting the dumb things. Besides, we all know that writing the documentation is the hardest part of any program. (Particularly once the good folks at id Software insisted upon releasing DOOM II...)
And finally, thanks to all the folks who've written in from hundreds of sites world-wide. You're the ones who've made xv a real success. (Well, that's not actually true. My love of nifty user-interfaces, all the wonderful code I've gotten from the folks listed above, and the fact that xv actually serves a useful purpose ("displaying pictures of naked women") are the things that have made xv a real success. You folks who've written in have given me a way to measure how successful xv is.) But I digress. Thanks!
By the way, when I last counted (in October 1992), xv was in use at 180 different Universities, and dozens of businesses, goverment agencies, and the like, in 27 countries on 6 of the 7 continents. Since then, I've received messages from hundreds of new sites. And xv has been spotted in Antartica, bringing the total to 7 of 7 continents, and allowing me to claim that xv is, in fact, truly global software. That's probably a good thing. Does anybody know if there's a Unix workstation in the Space Shuttle?... :-)
