A warm thanks to the developer -

An application such is this is what I have been hoping for since I started with OS X 10.1. I will use it for qualitative analysis of fieldwork translations. It is the first serious attempt to make a 'computer assisted qualitative data analysis software' (CAQDAS) program that uses the powers of OS X. There are two other competitors, Hyperresearch and TAMS, both cross platform. TAMS is very advanced, but lacking in the user interface department and in the utilization of native cocoa element. The carbon-based Hyperresearch has been stalled in development for years, with focus on the Windows version and still lagging in comparison with its Windows competitors.

As such, I would suggest some future improvements for this app:

- hierarchical comments, and/or hierarchical folders. This would allow for a manual meta-analysis of comments and for making higher order themes visible in the text.

- Support for "smart folders" that autoupdate as you update your comments, like in the Smart folders in the Finder, Mail, etc..

- A project approach, rather than single document one. In my case (and in many other kinds of text analysis) I need to analyze several different text sources.

- Support for more formats, ie. RTF and DOC. Almost all my text is in one of those formats, RTF being the standard format on OS X, and Word THE document standard on Windows. It seems very strange not to include support for them, at least as import possibilities. Another argument in favor of native RTF support is that bold headlines, names, etc. are sometimes useful metainformation when reading a text, hence important to textanalysis.

- A 'report' facility that would sum up the comments of a text (oops, just read the 'coming' features, thats what I meant).

... And this is just the short list.

As you might guess from this, I think the price is a bit steep for what I consider basic functionality.

Toke