First Impression? Good!

Do you suffer from those computer programs that have every bell and whistle you could possibly imagine ... and then some?

How many of the bells and whistles do you use?

Here's a really neat program - a free image viewer that's so stripped down you've probably never seen anything like it. It's called First Impression.

No bells.

No whistles.

Not even a user interface, menu bar or toolbar.

In fact, no anything on display. Just the image. Here's a screenshot from my computer. I'm looking at a photograph of sunflowers that I took last year ...

... with Windows Explorer in the background (that's what all the junk surrounding it is). The image - nothing else - just sits in front of whatever other program you're using.

So, if there are no menus or toolbars, how do you do anything useful with it?

Everything is behind the scenes. You can move from image to image using the spacebar and backspace keys. And if you want to do something more exotic, like rotate, resize, or resample the image, all you do is right-click and a make your choice from the menu that pops up.

Without the bells and whistles it's very quick, and the program file is tiny - just 234KB. So it’s ideal if you're using a netbook that may be a bit short on memory. What's more, you don't need to install it, nor does it make any registry changes or add DLL files to your computer. It runs directly from an executable file, so you can carry it around on a USB stick if you wish.

Less is more!

You can download First Impression from here. I recommend it.