1:29 pm
One of my side projects has borne some fruit. Meet Hex Fiend, a new hex editor for Mac OS X. (Hex editors allow you to edit the binary data of a file in hexadecimal or ASCII formats.)
Hex Fiend allows inserting and deleting as well as overwriting data. It supports 100+ GB files with ease. It provides a full undo stack, copy and paste, and other features you’ve come to expect from a Mac app. And it’s very fast, with a surprisingly small memory footprint that doesn’t depend on the size of the files you’re working with.
Hex Fiend was developed as an experiment in huge files. Specifically,
- How well can the Cocoa NSDocument system be made to work with very large files?
- How well can the Cocoa text system be extended to work with very large files?
- How well does Cocoa get along with 64 bit data in general?
- What are some techniques for representing more data than can fit in memory?
Check it out - it’s free, and it’s a Universal Binary. If you’ve got questions or comments about it or how it works, please leave a comment!
(Incidentally, the Hex Fiend main page was made with iWeb!)
Edit: I’ve discovered/been informed that drag and drop is busted. I will put out an update later tonight to fix this.
Edit 2: Hex Fiend 1.0.1 has been released to fix the drag and drop problems. Please redownload it by clicking on the icon above.
