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.
I kind of miss the age of freeware and shareware. It was often created by passionate individuals who put in a lot of care into the end product, which made it a joy to use. Once you paid for the software, you not only got the full version, but you felt good supporting someone who genuinely deserves it. There are still some examples of this, perhaps more so in the Apple ecosystem where proprietary/commercial software is the norm, but high quality software worth paying for is still rare.
Nowadays most software on Linux is open source, which is great, but the average quality is low, a lot of it is produced with little care and effort, it's quickly abandoned, and now in the age of "AI", even more so.
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.
There's something so appealing about those fvwm window borders, aliased font, crisp graphics, and the simple and intuitive UI of xv. There's nothing jumping at you to get your attention, no ambiguous UI elements and dark patterns, just a well designed and functional GUI. We truly lost something along the way, as modern GUIs are rarely this user friendly.
Wouldn't you love to see that rendered with antialiasing at Retina resolution, but the same on-screen real size as it was back on a 17" 800x600 monitor? I bet it would look delightful.
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 mostly learned programming GUI applications, in Xwindow and in general, studying the code of xv. The GUI controls were written from scratch using X resources and the code quality was top notch. I remember printing the full source code back in the winter break of 1994 at my university printers since I was going on vacations with my family and I was going to be completely disconnected. I studied the code writing side notes every time I had a moment to relax. Good times. Many thanks, John.
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?".
On several occasions, I’ve seen some outlandish claim or another on a new piece of software I’ve never heard of, started to roll my eyes, saw that Bellard had written it, and turned back to see what genius thing he’d come up with.
“New Halting Problem solver,” ok, sure buddy, “by Fabrice Bellard”, ok, so tell me how this works…
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.
I still use xv daily. I paid the sharewire price back in the day (I think it was $25), and the license, if I recall correctly, was a photo of John with a thumbs-up.
I've added a few patches here and there to deal with slightly more modern jpeg features and the like, and for the most part it handles everything I want to do, and the rest I do with imagemagick. For just looking at images I use xv all the time. Fast, and with some editing options as others have mentioned.
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.
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.
So far only two linkable reports of his death have been found. The other is on a Twitter-like site that is so full of anti-semite, white nationalist, and similar content and has so little of anything else that it makes Twitter look like a far left hang out.
Bradley wrote xv a long time ago and appears to be better known for his later work, including his music. Here's how he described himself on Soundcloud [1]:
> Guitar player, music producer, graphic designer, and "that guy who wrote XV" a very long time ago.
Moderators replaced that link with one to voxday.com, where it was posted by someone who was a bandmate and friend of Bradley.
Looking at that site it also seems rather out there, but it isn't a social media site. It is the site of Theodore Beale, a rather controversial writer and former video game developer [2].
The crucial difference is at the original site, being a Twitter-like social media site, if you scroll down you get a bunch of other posts they are promoting.
At the current link, the page is just about John Bradley. There are links to other things on the site but they at most suggest that the site is probably quite a bit outside the mainstream.
Compare to the original site. After scrolling past the posting about Bradley and 3 comments on that posting you get to section showing recent postings from the paid version of the site that they have chosen to promote, presumably to convince you to upgrade to the paid option.
Here's what it gave me.
• Someone saying they drive 5 miles to get gas from a white owned station instead of the one down the street from them, because an Indian is behind the counter.
• One about how the US was founded 100% by white Europeans and was 80-90% white for 200 years, and it is the flood of third world trash that is tearing down America. (In the replies to this one we learn that the real problem is the Jews who are the ones enabling this).
• Someone who says his radicalizing moment was when a non-citizen ahead of him in line at urgent without insurance was treated for free. (He would have been treated for free too if he did not have insurance, BTW).
• Someone saying any shortages of a variety of things are being fabricated. The comments of course mention that it is the Jews and the "bitches" that are doing the fabrication. Also blacks (whose presence in white countries is facilitated by Jews). Also, there is no such thing as a fossil fuel--oil is abiotic and continuously replenished but this info is being buried.
• A picture of Charlie Kirk and a quote by him. Nothing wrong with this one. The comments on it however...Jews were the ones that killed Kirk, Kirk was actually a Mossad agent, Kirk is not dead, several hinting at dark thing about his wife (and one wondering how he could have married her since she is a Catholic).
• Another one that doesn't seem bad until you get to the comments. It says that we are not trillion in debt, we are trillions in fraud. The comments let is know that this is what happens when Jews take over your country. Also blames Democrats because they can't count on the base (blacks, illegals, gays) so they have to steal. There is one that says 30% of the debt is attributable to Trump and then in 5 years Trump added more to the debt than Obama in 8 but it is near the bottom when sorted by likes so does not appear to be a popular sentiment there.
• A picture of a sticker which it says is being placed on gas pumps around the country. The sticker shows a man dressed like on Orthodox Jew, with a grin on his face and the stereotypical "Jewish nose" [3] that has been used in anti-Jewish caricatures since the 13th century. He his pointing the side, which if you place the sticker co.rrectly would be pointing toward the price on the gas pump. The text on the sticker says "THE JEWS DID THIS!". Plenty of agreement in the comments, and people noting these stickers should be on a lot more than gas pumps.
• Another one about Jews trying to destroy western civilization. Mentions Jews supported Black Lives Matter and immigrant rights. Some new craziness in the comments, like Trump is a free mason in the synagogue of satan.
I'm only halfway down the page at this point, and it will automatically load more the farther I go so this is just the tip of the iceberg.
It is no wonder that the submission with that URL got user flagged.
Thanks for taking the time to distill that. I saw the same there. When I say that Gab is a dumpster fire, I don't mean that some people there have political positions that I don't personally agree with. I mean that it's packed full of utterly vile content. This isn't some hangout for the likes of George Will and conservative intellectuals, saying calm, rational things that violate the "woke agenda" or such.
The current site "voxday" also claims a lot that Trump is "fake" as in, not the real Trump. Odd, I guess that's one of the delusions of the schizophrenic part of the far right?
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.
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.
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.
:waves: just saw tummy.com doesn’t resolve anymore. End of an era for sure.
uh oh tummy!
I hope you'll keep the fish happy.
TIL. And good to see you on HN!
Wonderful share, thanks
Great story, thanks for sharing. RIP John.
I kind of miss the age of freeware and shareware. It was often created by passionate individuals who put in a lot of care into the end product, which made it a joy to use. Once you paid for the software, you not only got the full version, but you felt good supporting someone who genuinely deserves it. There are still some examples of this, perhaps more so in the Apple ecosystem where proprietary/commercial software is the norm, but high quality software worth paying for is still rare.
Nowadays most software on Linux is open source, which is great, but the average quality is low, a lot of it is produced with little care and effort, it's quickly abandoned, and now in the age of "AI", even more so.
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.
There's something so appealing about those fvwm window borders, aliased font, crisp graphics, and the simple and intuitive UI of xv. There's nothing jumping at you to get your attention, no ambiguous UI elements and dark patterns, just a well designed and functional GUI. We truly lost something along the way, as modern GUIs are rarely this user friendly.
Wouldn't you love to see that rendered with antialiasing at Retina resolution, but the same on-screen real size as it was back on a 17" 800x600 monitor? I bet it would look delightful.
We have to go back
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)
Ironically, as Linux makes more inroads on the desktop, traditional Linux desktop software is falling away. A lot of it is still super useful!
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 mostly learned programming GUI applications, in Xwindow and in general, studying the code of xv. The GUI controls were written from scratch using X resources and the code quality was top notch. I remember printing the full source code back in the winter break of 1994 at my university printers since I was going on vacations with my family and I was going to be completely disconnected. I studied the code writing side notes every time I had a moment to relax. Good times. Many thanks, John.
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?".
On several occasions, I’ve seen some outlandish claim or another on a new piece of software I’ve never heard of, started to roll my eyes, saw that Bellard had written it, and turned back to see what genius thing he’d come up with.
“New Halting Problem solver,” ok, sure buddy, “by Fabrice Bellard”, ok, so tell me how this works…
I can't even imagine being able to think like he can.
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.
30 years later and the basic functionalities of Windows 3.1's File Manager and Word 6.0's object linking and embedding still aren't doable on the web.
I still use xv daily. I paid the sharewire price back in the day (I think it was $25), and the license, if I recall correctly, was a photo of John with a thumbs-up. I've added a few patches here and there to deal with slightly more modern jpeg features and the like, and for the most part it handles everything I want to do, and the rest I do with imagemagick. For just looking at images I use xv all the time. Fast, and with some editing options as others have mentioned.
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.
He was still accepting shareware payment for it on his website, which I think is amazing... https://xv.trilon.com/
Xv! A true blast from the past. A much unappreciated piece of software
I was blown away when I discovered xv in the early 90's. Coming from Deluxe Paint and Photon Paint, I was very impressed.
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.
So far only two linkable reports of his death have been found. The other is on a Twitter-like site that is so full of anti-semite, white nationalist, and similar content and has so little of anything else that it makes Twitter look like a far left hang out.
Bradley wrote xv a long time ago and appears to be better known for his later work, including his music. Here's how he described himself on Soundcloud [1]:
> Guitar player, music producer, graphic designer, and "that guy who wrote XV" a very long time ago.
Moderators replaced that link with one to voxday.com, where it was posted by someone who was a bandmate and friend of Bradley.
Looking at that site it also seems rather out there, but it isn't a social media site. It is the site of Theodore Beale, a rather controversial writer and former video game developer [2].
The crucial difference is at the original site, being a Twitter-like social media site, if you scroll down you get a bunch of other posts they are promoting.
At the current link, the page is just about John Bradley. There are links to other things on the site but they at most suggest that the site is probably quite a bit outside the mainstream.
Compare to the original site. After scrolling past the posting about Bradley and 3 comments on that posting you get to section showing recent postings from the paid version of the site that they have chosen to promote, presumably to convince you to upgrade to the paid option.
Here's what it gave me.
• Someone saying they drive 5 miles to get gas from a white owned station instead of the one down the street from them, because an Indian is behind the counter.
• One about how the US was founded 100% by white Europeans and was 80-90% white for 200 years, and it is the flood of third world trash that is tearing down America. (In the replies to this one we learn that the real problem is the Jews who are the ones enabling this).
• Someone who says his radicalizing moment was when a non-citizen ahead of him in line at urgent without insurance was treated for free. (He would have been treated for free too if he did not have insurance, BTW).
• Someone saying any shortages of a variety of things are being fabricated. The comments of course mention that it is the Jews and the "bitches" that are doing the fabrication. Also blacks (whose presence in white countries is facilitated by Jews). Also, there is no such thing as a fossil fuel--oil is abiotic and continuously replenished but this info is being buried.
• A picture of Charlie Kirk and a quote by him. Nothing wrong with this one. The comments on it however...Jews were the ones that killed Kirk, Kirk was actually a Mossad agent, Kirk is not dead, several hinting at dark thing about his wife (and one wondering how he could have married her since she is a Catholic).
• Another one that doesn't seem bad until you get to the comments. It says that we are not trillion in debt, we are trillions in fraud. The comments let is know that this is what happens when Jews take over your country. Also blames Democrats because they can't count on the base (blacks, illegals, gays) so they have to steal. There is one that says 30% of the debt is attributable to Trump and then in 5 years Trump added more to the debt than Obama in 8 but it is near the bottom when sorted by likes so does not appear to be a popular sentiment there.
• A picture of a sticker which it says is being placed on gas pumps around the country. The sticker shows a man dressed like on Orthodox Jew, with a grin on his face and the stereotypical "Jewish nose" [3] that has been used in anti-Jewish caricatures since the 13th century. He his pointing the side, which if you place the sticker co.rrectly would be pointing toward the price on the gas pump. The text on the sticker says "THE JEWS DID THIS!". Plenty of agreement in the comments, and people noting these stickers should be on a lot more than gas pumps.
• Another one about Jews trying to destroy western civilization. Mentions Jews supported Black Lives Matter and immigrant rights. Some new craziness in the comments, like Trump is a free mason in the synagogue of satan.
I'm only halfway down the page at this point, and it will automatically load more the farther I go so this is just the tip of the iceberg.
It is no wonder that the submission with that URL got user flagged.
[1] https://soundcloud.com/john-bradley-298288478
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Day
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_nose
Thanks for taking the time to distill that. I saw the same there. When I say that Gab is a dumpster fire, I don't mean that some people there have political positions that I don't personally agree with. I mean that it's packed full of utterly vile content. This isn't some hangout for the likes of George Will and conservative intellectuals, saying calm, rational things that violate the "woke agenda" or such.
The current site "voxday" also claims a lot that Trump is "fake" as in, not the real Trump. Odd, I guess that's one of the delusions of the schizophrenic part of the far right?
visual schnauzer
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.
you can try it. a few years ago some people picked up maintenance: https://github.com/jasper-software/xv
i just built it on my machine. works!
Here's two screenshots:
https://snapcraft.io/xv
Reminds me of the 90s cgi scene, softimage, lightwave3d
It uses raw Xlib to implement a custom widget toolkit. Yeah, it does feel Amiga-ish.
A button (thanks for the github link, em-bee):
https://github.com/jasper-software/xv/blob/main/src/xvbutt.c
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.
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!
The original link of this thread was to: https://gab.com/markofafreeman/posts/116290669616400528
Eww. Too bad interesting news comes from such a vile source. (This is the message below that as I write this: https://gab.com/disco/posts/116293438874138531)
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
Between Gab and Vox Day, is no one else writing about this guy except the extreme right? Is there not a better source available?
I've been wondering about that as well. It appears he & Vox Day were friends/collaborators and may have shared some political views: https://postcardsfromtheageofreason.com/2026/03/01/bpr1/
good athlete != good person
good actor != good person
good writer != good person
good programmer != good person
good person != nice person
nice person != talented person
TANJ TANSTAAFL SLATFATF
good person -> talented person
He may have been a bit of a Milkshake Duck
ciao John!
https://voxday.net/2026/03/25/rip-john-bradley/
We updated the link, thanks!
Why did the title change from "passed away" to "died", do you know? I really don't like the euphemism, so I prefer this one, just wondering.
It's just always been the convention to use that wording on HN, I guess for similar reasons to what you said of your own preference.
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