Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Manuscript Analyzer 1.3

A new version of Manuscript Analyzer is now available for download. This new version adds the following features:

- The dictionaries of Frequent Offenders and Phrases have been updated. Due to the self-updating nature of the dictionaries, a new release of the software was not actually required for this feature, but it bears mentioning.

- All dictionaries now support grouping of "like words" into single entries. For instance, "look/looked/looking" are all now shown as a single entry, rather than three separate entries. This gives a much more accurate view of the frequency with which frequent offenders are used.

- A filter feature has been added. This allows you to quickly filter out any entries that don't meet criteria of your choosing. At present, you can require that words contain/start with/end with a set of characters, or you can insist that a word or phrase "Equals" a specific value (for example, bring back only the word "and," without including other results like "andy," which the "Contains" filter would include).

I've recently added some screen shots to my tools page. You can also see them here:



UPDATE: 1.3a is now the current version online, as that fixes a minor issue with sorting that was introduced in 1.3.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Chris,
It's paul phillips, we chatted last year. I'm not sure if you remember......
I'm interested in the manuscript analyzer you posted today. I run a Mac, so do I need to download the mono program first?
Let me know what I need to do and I'll report back on my progress.

just send an e-mail via my web site,

www.paulphillips.ca

Paul

Christopher M. Park said...

Hi Paul,

Good to hear from you, I do indeed remember. Glad you stopped back by!

The Mono program would be required first on a Mac, yes. That's the "framework" on which my program runs. I'd be very interested to hear if my program runs on Mono or not -- if you get a chance, please let me know how it turns out.

There's a chance that the program might not work on the current version of Mono, and in that case, we'll just have to wait until a newer version of Mono comes out that supports more of the .NET 2.0 features (that's currently partially supported).

Stephen Parrish said...

Tried and failed to download. Warning said I needed "NET Framework." I don't even know what it is.

Christopher M. Park said...

Whoops, I linked directly to the executable, didn't I? I've fixed that so that the link in this post now goes to the tools page. The link for the.NET Framework is just above the link for my tool.

The .NET Framework is a code platform by Microsoft, and it's what my tool is coded to run on.

Anonymous said...

Hi Chris,
I tried to run your program with the mono program with no luck.

I can install mono with no problem but when I try to run your application it asks what program I want to use (because mac does not recognize .exe files)and there doesn't seem to be anything in the mono folder that will allow it to run.

Any ideas?

Paul

Christopher M. Park said...

My apologies, Paul, I need to do some work on my end first. Thanks for the update!

Christopher M. Park said...

Hi Paul,

Unfortunately, the news isn't good. I learned a bit more about Mono and tried to get it running my program on my PC -- no dice. It ran a lot of it, but was exceedingly slow and crashed while doing the analysis. We'll just have to wait for future versions of Mono to be released.

On the plus side, I've learned that there is a way to embed the Mono runtime into an application, so when Mono is fully ready for my code, I'll do that -- then it should just work on Macs and Linux with a single download, without the need to install the Mono libraries.

Sorry this doesn't work for you, but I very much appreciate your doing a bit of field testing for me. Perhaps at some point I'll write a (scaled down) version of this program to run on the web. But I've got enough going on right now, so that's a ways off!

Chris

Stephen Parrish said...

The .NET Framework is a code platform by Microsoft, and it's what my tool is coded to run on.

I love it when you talk dirty.

Sherrie Super said...

Very cool! Thanks so much for this handy-dandy tool. It's terrific!

Christopher M. Park said...

No problem! Glad you found it helpful!