WordSmith Tools 5.0, Tenka Text in China

Mike Scott has finally released a public beta of WordSmith Tools 5.0. I want to quote him on a few points:

System Requirements

WordSmith Tools 5 is for Windows 2000 or later. It will be happiest on a fairly modern PC (e.g bought in the last 4 years) with plenty of memory and hard disk space. Or an Intel Mac running Windows.

Now that's an interesting world view we have here. What's an Intel Mac anyway? It's a PC produced by Apple. So this sentence actually reads: System Requirements: a PC running Windows or a PC (produced by Apple) running Windows. Technically deep Mr. Scott seems to be. -__-"

Here is my favourite one:

What's new in version 5

WordSmith is organic software!
Version 4 was a complete new re-write. Since it was launched in 2004, numerous re-compilations of WS4 were issued (about one a week on average), sometimes with a very small bug-fix but other times incorporating changes users had suggested. At the same time the Help was updated. Version 5.0 was started in June 2007, three years after version 4.0 and will continue this organic policy of growth...

Organic software? Come on Mike. You could have come up with a better excuse for suddenly raising the version number by +1.0 point without actually introducing any considerable improvements. Just tell people you felt like jumping or sth like that. Can you imagine Linux devs calling kernel version 2.6.22 3.0 out of the blue just because they wanted to have a new, shiny, attractive version number? What you do is what I would call a live branching in SCM terms.


Well, that's enough advertisement for my competitor.

Let's focus on more serious development news. I stopped working on the user interface for this week. My current development focus is on class library design:
  1. I've completely rewritten FrequencyList class.
    Old code vs New code
  2. I'm now rewriting the Concordance class.
    Old code vs New code
A final word about my project here in this post: Tenka Text has seen its first academic acknowledgement ^__^ at the following blog http://xpq.blogspot.com/ (see T under academic links).

Researchers from the USA and China have always been kind enough to praise Tenka Text for its speed (relative to any other tool (including WST 4 (or 5 or any imaginable later version)) they state to have used) and now I've also seen my project listed among other academic software. That will surely give me the necessary push to keep developing intensively and I plan to release a new version somewhere between 2007-06-30 and 2007-07-07. More on this and other news later!

Comments

Anonymous said…
Your corpus analysis software is much better than the wordsmith software. Thanks for the software.
- Pranesh Bhargava
June 19, 2009 at 2:21 AM
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