CasualConc is a concordance program that runs natively on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It is written in Ruby + RubyCocoa and designed for casual use (preliminary analysis or non-research purposes). CasualConc can handle a corpus with 1 million tokens at reasonable speed. If your corpus has more than 10 million tokens, it can be very slow depending on how many hits it returns (based on my machine Mac mini C2D 1.86GHz). It can generate kwic concordance lines, word clusters, collocation analyses, and word count. This program is only tested with English text just because that is the only language I can understand other than Japanese. If you use CasualConc with other languages, let me know how it works.
Current Version: 0.9.6 (beta) - last updated on 5/06/2008
For more up-to-date information, check CasualConc Blog.
System requirement: Mac OS X 10.5.2 (Leopard) or later, optimized for 1280x800 or larger screen, with plenty of memory (1GB or more); Ruby 1.8.6 (haven't tested on 1.9) (Ruby 1.8.6 is pre-installed on Leopard)
File format: works best with text files (.txt) encoded in ASCII or UTF-8 Experimentally a few other encodings are added as well as a few other file formats. CasualConc might miss some of the files in these formats. PDF files should be text-embeded. You can create database files from these file types except for PDFs. NEW!!
Supported languages: any single-byte character language separated by single-byte space. Experimentally, very limited Japanese support is implemented in File Mode. Other East Asian Language files might also work (as long as they are encoded in UTF-8). You need to specify the language setting in Preferences to use Japanese. NEW!!
Target User:
Mac users who don't want to start up Windows machine, switch to
BootCamp, or run Virtual PC/Parallels/VM Ware for simple concordancing
for preliminary analysis, preparing teaching materials, learning, etc.
(CasualConc is probably not good enough as your primary research tool)
This program is still under development. Basic functions are ready, but I haven't finalized the features and haven't really tested it, and also documentation is not done (I'm working on it). But if you are brave enough to test it , go to the download page and try it and let me hear what you think. Email me at casualconc (at) gmail.com. (replace (at) with @).
By the way, CasualConc is freeware, but if you think it is useful, buy me lunch or coffee or good chocolate if we ever meet : ).
The utility programs on this site are also written in Ruby + RubyCocoa and require Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. They are also free, but please use them at your own risk.