The Practice Viewer Upgrade is an upgrade to OS/2 Multimedia that makes the Multimedia Viewer provided with the Warp Bonus Pack faster and more useful.

• The Lightning Browser
• JPEG Support
• Light Table .JPG Patch

The JPEG support that comes with the Practice Viewer Upgrade is a new version of JPEGPROC, previously available separately from Practice Corporation. Future versions of JPEGPROC will be bundled with the Practice Viewer Upgrade.

The Lightning Browser is a much-improved image browser that can replace the one that comes with the Multimedia Viewer (IB.EXE). The Lightning Browser:

• Loads images twice as fast as IB.
• Is multithreaded (won't freeze the system while loading images!)
• Moves or resizes images virtually instantaneously.
• Lets you grab the image anywhere for easier moving around the screen.
• Can preserve the original aspect ratio.
• Doesn't waste space in the image window.
• Supports long file names.
• Supports drag and drop.
• Only files with valid multimedia image content are openable and drop-enabled.
• Doesn't unnecessarily dither 24-bit images (they appear as they do in Web Explorer, not IB).
• Uses palette manager on 256-color systems.

  The Lightning Browser is designed to let you handle pictures on the screen the way you would handle real-world snapshots. It is not an image editing application.

The JPEG support component of the Practice Viewer Upgrade enables OS/2 Multimedia applications to read and write JPEG compressed image files. Specifically, it:

• Enables Light Tables to display thumbnail images of JPEG files.
• Enables the Lightning Browser (LB.EXE) and the standard image browser (IB.EXE) to display JPEG files.
• Enables the multimedia data converter (FFC.EXE) to convert other supported formats to and from JPEG.
• Enables any multimedia application written for OS/2 to read and write JPEG files.

The JPEG support contained in this upgrade works with progressive JPEG files, which are becoming popular on the World Wide Web.