JEFview

Happy Birthday, StitchBuddy!

At January 4^th, 2008, I released the first version of StitchBuddy’s predecessor.

JEFview was a QuickLook plugin, originally written to preview designs of my wife’s brand-new Janome MC350e on the Apple iBook she was using. JEFview was a free download, and because of many user requests it was followed by PESviewQL for Brother embroidery machines. I combined both plugins and created StitchBuddy, supporting more file formats and offering editing functions.

I rewrote all code to support more file formats and enable future enhancements, now it’s a kind of embroidery framework I’ll use for upcoming applications. The first steps are releases of StitchBuddy-QL and StitchBuddy-MD to preview PES and JEF embroidery files in the Finder and search for them with Spotlight.

I messed up the bundle identifier in info.plist, which might cause collisions: corrected.

Now JEFview will provide better error descriptions if a file could not be read (to be checked with Console.app).

My wife bought a Janome MC350E last year and started to collect embroidery files. It’s easy to transfer them from her Apple iBook to the embroidery machine as the Janome supports USB memory sticks: Just plug the stick into the iBook, copy JEF files into the right folder and you’re done. Unfortunately previewing designs isn’t that easy: Although the touchscreen of the Janome shows thumbnail images, there’s no way to identify designs in the Finder of Mac OS X.