MarcEdit 6 Update is available

After spending the last 3 months of work — I’ve posted the latest and greatest version of MarcEdit; MarcEdit 6.0.  This represents a significant change on a number of fronts — first and foremost, a lot of code has been reformatted to provide better support for non-Windows systems.  For the first time, a MarcEdit packaged App file is being provided to give Mac users one click installation of the application.  This means that at this point, the installation process for a Mac is as simple as — Install Mono, then download the MarcEdit app.  Unzip, and run.  For Linux systems, a zip file can be downloaded, which includes the 3 steps needed to run the application. 

No while I have spent a significant amount of time and code working on MarcEdit to make it run better on non-Windows systems, I will say up front that this is still a work in progress.  You will occasionally run into UI issues and very likely run into times when the program crashes.  Additionally, at this time, Z39.50 functionality will not work on the Mac.  This should be temporary as I work on implementing a webservice that will simplify how MarcEdit provides these services and removes a dependency.  At this point, I have all the code for the service, I just need to find a place to host the project.  If you are using MarcEdit on a Mac — I’d love to hear how it’s going.  I’ll likely be spending the next year working to translate the over 150 GUI elements to MonoMac, a native Cocoa implementation of the UI elements — this should solve many of the Mac UI problems and allow MarcEdit to look and feel like a regular Mac application.  However, this is a significant time commitment so before I consider doing this work — I’ll want to get an idea of how widely used the Mac version of the application is.  So, if you are a Mac user and want to continue to see this improve — send me feedback.  Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t thank the folks at the Ohio State University Libraries for making a Mac system available for me to do testing.  Without it, the Mac app bundle simply wouldn’t exist.

Now the changes — this version saw the deletion of over 10,000 lines of code, and the creation of close to 28,000 lines of new code.  There were a handful of new tools, lots of new functions, and a number of bug and UI fixes.  In the end, I closed 47 tickets.  For the full list of changes — please see the below. 

So how do you get the program.  If you are current MarcEdit user, the program will prompt you to update the next time you run the program.  The application will automatically try to migrate your data from MarcEdit 5.x to the new MarcEdit 6.0 directory — and will prompt you if successful.  If not, you can manually transfer the data by selecting the Help menu, About, and Migrate data.  If you are a Mac or Linux user, go to the download page and select the appropriate download. 

For direct links:

• Windows 32-bit: http://marcedit.reeset.net/software/MarcEdit_Setup.msi
• Windows 64-bit: http://marcedit.reeset.net/software/MarcEdit_Setup64.msi
• Mac App: http://marcedit.reeset.net/software/MarcEdit_app.zip
• Linux (or Mac if you don’t want to use the app): http://marcedit.reeset.net/software/marcedit.bin.zip

MarcEdit 6 is an in place replacement of MarcEdit 5.  You cannot run these two versions on the same system.  For that reason, I’m leaving the last version of MarcEdit 5.9 available just in case users run into issues with 6.0 as everything shakes out.  To use this version, you will have to uninstall MarcEdit 6, and then go to the download page at: http://marcedit.reeset.net/downloads.

–TR

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