If you are not a Mac user or not using OS X 10.5 Leopard, please ignore this message. And this message is long, so if you are not interested, please ignore this.
I'm wondering if there is anyone who uses Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and is willing to test a concordance program I'm writing for it.
I'm a graduate student who wants to use corpus analysis for a dissertation. I started learning Ruby about a year ago for text analysis and ended up with a GUI program, partly because I couldn't find a corpus program for Mac that looks like a Mac program (I'd like to know if there is any good one; I just want to do whatever I can do on Mac). This program is written in Ruby+RubyCocoa and only runs on Mac OS X 10.5.3 or later. I saw Python was recommended on this list, but because I could find more info in Japanese, I chose Ruby.
The program (I named it CasualConc) is designed for casual use (material preparation for teaching, preliminary research, etc., but not for serious research) and is still under development. But it has most of the features I wanted to include initially. It was originally designed to work with English, but most of the European languages should work fine. I started to implement East Asian language support, but it's still very limited.
Now I'm wondering if there is anyone who is interested in testing it and give me some feedback. I've had a few users around the world and got some positive comments, but I'd like to have more. Other than bug reports, I'd like to know the usability of the program, terminology used on the program, and accuracy of the results and statistical calculations (which I implemented experimentally). I'd also like to have any kind of feedback on the website I created (accuracy/clarity of info, terminology, my language, etc.). My goal is to make this easy enough to use even for not-so-tech-savvy language teachers/ students.
I've only taken one intro corpus linguistics course, so there might be many problems with the program (misunderstood concepts, etc.) and the site. Although I don't have much time to make major changes now, if there's any feature that should be added, I'll see if I can add it. But because I learned Ruby by myself without much programming background (I only knew a bit of MS-BASIC and Javascript when I started), it's very likely that I can't do much with my very limited knowledge.
The program is available at http://casualconc.googlepages.com/home More detailed information about the program is on the site and on a blog linked to the site.
If you are interested, please go to the site, download the program and send any feedback to me directly or to the address on the site or leave your comment on a discussion board (Google groups) linked to the site. I'd appreciate any kind of comments/feedback.
Thank you, Yasu Imao