CasualConc is a concordance program that runs natively on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. It is 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.
Note: Because Google decided to abandon Google Page Creator and is gradually shifting their focus to Google Sites, I created a new site on it. The new site has a little more information (up to date) than this site. Files are still on this site, but for information about CasualConc and utility programs, check the new CasualConc site.
Warning: If you are upgrading from 0.9.8 or earlier, your user setting will be lost. If you want to use your settings, change the name of "com.apple.rubycocoa.CasualConcApp.plist" in your home -> Library -> Prefereces folder to CasualConcApp.plist". Your Corpus/Database settings in Advance Mode should be safe without doing this.
Current Version: 0.9.9.4 (beta) - last updated on 03/30/2009
For more up-to-date information, check CasualConc Blog.
System requirement: Intel or PPC Mac with Mac OS X 10.5.5 (Leopard) or later, optimized for 1280x800 or larger screen, with plenty of memory (1GB or more)
File format: works best with plain text files (.txt) encoded in ASCII or UTF-8, but can handle other file types and other encodings (see Preferences - Files (on new site)). Reading non-plain text files will take more time to process. PDF files should be text-embeded. You can create database files from these file types except for PDFs for faster search. Check How to Use (on new site) for more information.
Supported languages: any single-byte character language separated by single-byte space. Double-byte character language (East Asian languages) support is limited (non-Japanese East Asian language files need to be encoded in UTF-8). You need to specify the language setting in Preferences to use Japanese.
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. But if you are brave enough to test it, go to the download page and try it. I'd really appreciate your feedback. It will motivate me to improve CasualConc. Please 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 also require Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. They are also free, but please use them at your own risk.