It’s with a little trepidation that I’m formally making the first Public Preview of the MarcEdit OSX version available for download and use. In fact, as of today, this version is now *the* OSX download available on the downloads page. I will no longer be building the old code-base for use on OSX.
When I first started this project around Mid-April, I began knowing that this process would take some time. I’ve been working on MarcEdit continuously for a little over 16 years. It’s gone through one significant rewrite (when the program moved from Assembly to C#) and has had way too many revisions to count. In agreeing to take on the porting work — I’d hoped that I could port a significant portion of the program over the course of about 8 months and that by the end of August, I could produce a version of MarcEdit that would cover the 80% or so of the commonly used application toolset. To do this, it meant porting the MARC Tools portion of the application and the MarcEditor.
Well, I’m ahead of schedule. Since about 2014, I’ve been reworking a good deal of the application to support a smoother porting process sometime in the future — though, honestly, I wasn’t sure that I’d ever actual do the porting work. Pleasantly, this early work has made a good deal of the porting work easier allowing me to move faster than I’d anticipated. As of this posting, a significant portion of that 80% has been converted, and I think that for many people — most of what they probably use daily — has been implemented. And while I’m ahead of schedule and have been happy with how the porting process has gone, make no mistake — it’s been a lot of work, and a lot of code. Even though this work has primarily been centered around rewriting just the UI portions of MarcEdit, you are still talking, as of today, close to 200,000 lines of code. This doesn’t include the significant amount of work I’ve done around the general assemblies that have provided improvements to all MarcEdit users. Because of that — I need to start getting feedback from users. While the general assemblies go through an automated testing process — I haven’t, as of yet, come up with an automated testing process for the OSX build. This means that I’m testing things manually, and simply cannot go through the same leveling of testing that I do each time I build the Windows version. Most folks may not realize it, but it takes about a day to build the Windows version — as the program goes through various unit tests processing close to 25 million records. I simply don’t have an equivalent of that process yet, so I’m hoping that everyone interested in this work will give it a spin, use it for real work, and let me know if/when things fall down.
In creating the Preview, I’ve tried to make the process for users as easy as possible. Users interested in running the program simply need to be running at least OSX 10.8 and download the dmg found here: http://marcedit.reeset.net/downloads. Once downloaded, run the dmg an a new disk will mount called MarcEdit OSX. Run this file, and you’ll see the following installer:
Drag the MarcEdit icon into the Applications folder and the application will either install, or overwrite an existing version. That’s it. No other downloads are necessary. On first run, the program will generate a marcedit folder under /users/[yourid]/marcedit. I realize that this isn’t completely normal — but I need the data accessible outside of the normal app sandbox to easily support updates. I’d also considered the User Documents folder, but the configuration data probably shouldn’t live there either. So, this is where I ended up putting it.
So what’s been completed — Essentially, all the MARC Tools functions and a significant amount of the MarcEditor has been completed. There are some conspicuous functions that are absent at this point though. The Call Number and Fast Heading generation, the Delimited Text Translator and Exporter, the Select and Delete Selected Records, everything Z39.50 related, as well as the Linked Data tools and the Integration work with OCLC and Koha. All these are not currently available — but will be worked on. At this point, what users can do is start letting me know what absent components are impacting you the most, and I’ll see how they fit into the current development roadmap.
Anyway — that’s it. I’m excited to let you all give this a try, and a little nervous as well. This has been a significant undertaking which has definitely pushed me a bit, requiring me to learn Object-C in a short period of time, as well as quickly assimilate a significant portion of Apples SDK documents relating to UI design. I’m sure I’ve missed things, but it’s time to let other folks start working with it.
If you have been interested in this work — download the installer, kick the tires, and give feedback. Just remember to be gentle. 🙂
–TR
Download URL: http://marcedit.reeset.net/downloads