Firehand Ember

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Firehand Ember is a Windows-based image viewer, editor and organizer.

Firehand Ember comes in two editions, a lightweight free edition for image viewing and a heavyweight image processing edition.

The lightweight edition essentially consists of two programs; a browser and a viewer (called a "popup" by the application). The user can configure either to run when an image is double clicked. The browser displays in its window thumbnails for all images in the directory of the selected image. The viewer simply displays the image. If an image is selected in the browser and double clicked, the viewer displays that image. Closing the viewer then takes the user back to the browser.

While using the Viewer, you can advance from picture to the next or the previous by holding the CTRL key and press an arrow key. The menu can also easily be remove from the view and the view can display its pictures full screen. Slideshow options are also available.

The browser is extremely fast and when it makes thumbnails, it makes them on the fly leaving no unwanted files on your hard disk. The browser does not keep your thumbnails in a database or library. When you move files around in the browser it really moves them on the hard disk thus allowing you to organize your files on the disk. Simple tasks like rotating and resizing pictures can be done from the browser one at a time or in large batches. Such changes take place with no apparent loss in picture quality. You can also change from one picture format to another in large batches. Some of these features may be absent from the free version.

Firehand Technologies was also caught putting malicious code in their product as an attempt to fight theft. The steps taken however, resulted in hard drive reformatting for the party trying to breach Ember's security.

Unfortunately, the website "www.firehand.com" has been listed by Network Solutions as having expired on 09-16-2007 and is pending renewal or deletion. This company appears to have gone out of business. ^[1]

Matthew Warren Smith, the founder and primary engineer of Firehand died in 2007. ^[2]

The website "www.firehand.com" is now "re-used" as a site on Fire Extinguishers.