Comments on: Hex Fiend

By: dvd library for mac

dvd library for mac — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:35:50 +0000

Delicious Library is really cool, now i used iskysoft dvd-library for mac beta to manage and backup DVDs legally

By: Christopher Fox

Christopher Fox — Thu, 18 May 2006 20:06:41 +0000

Sounds like you’ve gotten so much positive feedback for Hex Fiend, you should consider a Hex Fiend Pro that implements many of these features! You could either charge for it, or release it to Apple and have them add it to the developer tools install.

Awesome app!

By: Evan Schoenberg

Evan Schoenberg — Thu, 13 Apr 2006 07:17:32 +0000

Wow! That has to be the first time I’ve seen ‘petabyte’ in an actual dialogue…

Please do share some of what you learned in the process of making Hex Fiend

By: me

me — Mon, 03 Apr 2006 01:03:32 +0000

Great job!

By: Jim Schimpf

Jim Schimpf — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 15:56:28 +0000

Did you know that your app is killed by that same image that kills Safari from DrunkenBlog ? I got a copy to play with and just for fun I tried to open it, Hex Fiend dies just after clicking open. But don’t feel too bad Hex Edit does the same thing.

By: Jim Schimpf

Jim Schimpf — Fri, 31 Mar 2006 15:47:15 +0000

Very nice job. I especially like the Data Inspector. I do embedded work and this is very useful to explore memory dumps and such. The display isn’t quite as bright and clear as HexEdit but the speed is incredible.

Thanks very much.

By: Johannes Fortmann

Johannes Fortmann — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 20:44:21 +0000

Thanks So Much!
A few suggestions:
- the gutter font seems really tiny to me. I’m short-sighted, but I’m not blind, so I’d guess other people would have the same problem.
- a display of offsets in hex would be cool; also the selection length should be displayed additionally to the start and end.
- the inspector could show the values of a sizeof(type) aligned chunk under the cursor if nothing else is selected. (i.e. 4-byte aligned for int, the byte under the cursor for a char)
- my favourite hex editor (hedit for NT 3.51) had a search dialog that displays both hex and ASCII search at the same time. Basically, the search input field is just another hex view.
That makes it possible to easily enter mixtures of readable strings and random bytes (e.g. pstrings).

Cosmetic:
- the hex view apparently displays exactly the right amount to fill the window. That looks funny though if you resize the window to show n+1/2 lines: when scrolling, the new lines suddenly pop into view; the easy fix is to just display one additional line.
- undoing changes made through a drag operation causes the view to jump, even though the changes were entirely in the current view area.
- the data inspector seems to mix small and mini control sizes. At least that’s what I believe; anyway, it looks awkward somehow…

Well, that’s a lot of criticism; please understand that it’s all meant to be constructive. I’ve already thought about implementing a hex editor myself, until you came to the rescue

EDIT: there I was, thinking that a 10 billions were a very large number…

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 18:08:21 +0000

I’m sorry if I came off as accusatory earlier. Thanks for the info! It’s nice to know this app will help other developers do their thing.

By: Uli Kusterer

Uli Kusterer — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 11:25:55 +0000

Empty AREAS of the window, I mean, not files … sigh.

By: Uli Kusterer

Uli Kusterer — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 11:23:47 +0000

Some more thoughts: HexEdit lets one open the resource fork of a file as well. Would be nice to maybe allow doing that. I’d probably go for a “resource” and “data” tab, then someone could copy between the two forks, or convert old-style resource forks into data-fork resfiles etc. I don’t really need HexEdit’s built-in disassembler, so I’m not gonna request that.

Also, Resorcerer’s hex editor had the stuff you display in the “Data Inspector” in the status bar instead, which is a little more convenient. It would simply display all data types that made sense for a selected range of bytes (i.e. no 64-bit display when only 4 are selected, OTOH it also showed 4 bytes as a Quickdraw point etc… Would be nice to be able to view something as a CGPoint or long long that way).

On the hex/ASCII area separation: Apparently this is only an issue with files of 16 bytes or less, as then the first line is white and the second line isn’t colored with alternating row colors. So, if you could just have empty files display the row coloring anyway, that’d be quite sufficient to solve the problem.

Cheers, keep up the good work,
– Uli