[Corpora-List] Looking for beta testers for a concordance program for Mac OS X 10.5

[Imao Yasuhiro]

Dear list members,

If you are not a Mac user or not using OS X 10.5 Leopard, please  
ignore this message.  And this message is long, so if you are not  
interested, please ignore this.


I'm wondering if there is anyone who uses Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and is  
willing to test a concordance program I'm writing for it.

I'm a graduate student who wants to use corpus analysis for a  
dissertation.  I started learning Ruby about a year ago for text  
analysis and ended up with a GUI program, partly because I couldn't  
find a corpus program for Mac that looks like a Mac program (I'd like  
to know if there is any good one; I just want to do whatever I can do  
on Mac).  This program is written in Ruby+RubyCocoa and only runs on  
Mac OS X 10.5.3 or later.  I saw Python was recommended on this list,  
but because I could find more info in Japanese, I chose Ruby.

The program (I named it CasualConc) is designed for casual use  
(material preparation for teaching, preliminary research, etc., but  
not for serious research) and is still under development.  But it has  
most of the features I wanted to include initially.  It was originally  
designed to work with English, but most of the European languages  
should work fine.  I started to implement East Asian language support,  
but it's still very limited.

Now I'm wondering if there is anyone who is interested in testing it  
and give me some feedback.  I've had a few users around the world and  
got some positive comments, but I'd like to have more.  Other than bug  
reports, I'd like to know the usability of the program, terminology  
used on the program, and accuracy of the results and statistical  
calculations (which I implemented experimentally).  I'd also like to  
have any kind of feedback on the website I created (accuracy/clarity  
of info, terminology, my language, etc.).  My goal is to make this  
easy enough to use even for not-so-tech-savvy language teachers/ 
students.

I've only taken one intro corpus linguistics course, so there might be  
many problems with the program (misunderstood concepts, etc.) and the  
site.  Although I don't have much time to make major changes now, if  
there's any feature that should be added, I'll see if I can add it.   
But because I learned Ruby by myself without much programming  
background (I only knew a bit of MS-BASIC and Javascript when I  
started), it's very likely that I can't do much with my very limited  
knowledge.

The program is available at
http://casualconc.googlepages.com/home
More detailed information about the program is on the site and on a  
blog linked to the site.

If you are interested, please go to the site, download the program and  
send any feedback to me directly or to the address on the site or  
leave your comment on a discussion board (Google groups) linked to the  
site.  I'd appreciate any kind of comments/feedback.

Thank you,
Yasu Imao

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