Just found a nice review of XRay (and some competitors, but that’s cool) by MacFixit’s Dan Frakes in an article called “Troubleshooting Tools: File Utilities“. Thanks Dan!
In other news, work on XRay 2 is continuining although I hesitate to insert the word “apace” here – there have been many offline emergencies to take care of, unfortunately. Basically, I think I have the general UI reasonably well defined and now am working on the background file engine. I’ve retreated from using WebKit for the main info view because of efficiency issues. However, the benefits of reading the WebKit source code were great, and I may still use it for some parts.
As usual, UI considerations are very important in my mind and I got sidetracked, although profitably, several times. The longest delay happened when I got tired of battling NSSplitView and took several months off to write RBSplitView. The experience gained from this proved invaluable later on, although at a time it looked like my other UI revisions would make a split view completely unnecessary… but right now it’s in again.
More on this as it happens!
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