From: a-giles@uchicago.edu (Aaron Giles)
Subject: Beta testers wanted for JPEG/GIF viewer
Reply-To: a-giles@uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago High Energy Physics
Distribution: comp
Date: Fri, 9 Oct 1992 13:54:32 GMT


Hi,

I'm looking for about 20 people who would be willing to spend some
time beta testing my latest free release of JPEGView, version 2.0.
A lot of work has gone into putting some major improvements into the
new version, and I'm hoping to ensure its stability by enlisting the
help of a large cross-section of Mac users.  JPEGView requires System
7.0 or later and QuickTime to run.

The primary new features of version 2.0 are:

* Vastly improved JPEG display quality on 256 and 16-color systems,
  using color quantization techniques
* FAST GIF decoding and display
* Support for more JPEG file formats
* Improved stability when handling large PICT files
* Extended help and preferences interfaces

For those unfamiliar with JPEGView in its previous incarnations, here
is a brief list of some of the important features:

* Fast JPEG display
* Automatic rescaling of images to fit on your screen
* Crop and zoom features to look at the details of shrunk images
* Low memory requirements (this applies to GIFs as well)
* Automatic slide show
* Conversion between QuickTime JPEG and JFIF formats
* Full screen mode
* It's free (well, postcardware)

So, what am I looking for in a beta tester?  I'm primarily interested
in those who can spare an hour or two a day for two or three weeks
playing with the program in an extraordinary way, trying their best to
make things go wrong.  I'm not really interested in someone who just
wants to look at pictures; I need people who will try some pretty
esoteric things!  I'd like to get at least one person on nearly
all QuickTime-capable Mac models, with varying memory capacities.  In
addition, if any of the following apply to you, it's a plus:

- Your system runs two or more monitors
- You have Macsbug installed
- You have some Mac programming experience
- You have lots of GIF, JPEG, and/or PICT images to play with
- You're running System 7.1 in some form

None of these is required, however!  In fact, the only strict
requirement I have is that YOU MUST BE ABLE TO RECEIVE AND DECODE
BINHEX'D FILES VIA INTERNET EMAIL!  This is, of course, very
important! :-)  I will break the file up into chunks of less than 32k
each, for those who use AppleLink accounts; other than that, there's
no size limitation.  Oh, and you have to provide your own pictures to
look at. :-)

If you are interested and think you have the time to spare looking at
pictures, drop me a line and explain to me why you'd be a good beta
tester.  I probably won't need much convincing, but I would at the
very least like to know (a) what model of Mac you use, (b) what sort
of monitor setup you have, (c) what System version you're running, and
(d) what extensions you use on your system.

I hope to have the first beta release ready sometime next week, so the
absolute deadline will tentatively be October 16th.  However, this
could very well be moved up, depending on my progress this weekend.
I'll post messages in comp.sys.mac.apps and comp.sys.mac.programmer
when I'm finished accepting beta testers.

Thanks for your time,
Aaron Giles
a-giles@uchicago.edu