About Jade

Jade 1.2 Jade is a JPEG viewer based on the Independent JPEG Group's library of JPEG compression and decompression routines. It's main purpose is to fill the gap in Macintosh JPEG viewers which can view full sized JPEG images while maintaining reasonable memory and speed requirements. It was also made to be useful as a helper application in Netscape or any other web browser application that supports helpers. Advantages Over Other JPEG viewers Jade's main advantage lies in it's virtual memory scheme which allows memory requirements to be very low. One tradeoff is that it requires much more free disk space. Since RAM is fairly expensive relative to hard disk space this is a pretty good tradeoff. Using disk space, Jade allows you to have a large number (limited by it's parition size) of images open simulataneously with few speed penalties. Other JPEG viewers are usually RAM based, and when RAM runs out, need to re-decompress images which can take a relatively long time; especially when there are 30+ images. In addition to having more images open at once, Jade can also view JPEG images at their full size; all you really need is the disk space. Jade is also fast at JPEG decompression. Jade offers various display modes which alow you to tradeoff image quality for speed. The only exception I've found is when color quantization is used (when the monitor can only display 256 colors or less). But when it's not used it really flies; especially on a Powermac. Jade is also multithreaded. This means that you can decompress more than one image at a time. For example, if you use Jade as a helper for Netscape, when you download image A, you can go back into Netscape and download image B, while image A is being decompessed. If image B is finished being downloaded while image A is still being decompressed, decompression will immediately begin on image B. Being multithreaded means that even when Jade is busy decompressing images, all of its functions are still available to you. One minor disadvantage of the virtual memory scheme is that if Jade happens to crash or terminate abnormally (e.g., by force quitting it), it will leave its temporary files on the disk. To remove these temporary files, you should restart your computer. Upon restarting, all these temporary files will appear in your trash. All you need to do is empty it. Requirements A 68020 (or higher) or PowerPC Macintosh running system 7.5 or later. Or, a macintosh running system 7.0 (or later) with the Thread Manager extention. Legal Use Jade at your own risk. I the author will not be responsible for any damage implicitly or explicitly caused by Jade. Jade may be freely non-commercially distributed (e.g., non-profit). Commercial distribution requires author's consent. Jade is FREE. I only ask that you send me bug reports and/or constructive criticism/ideas/features on how to improve Jade. You can reach me at: e-mail: eshieh@ng.netgate.net Postal Service: Eric…