View, Edit, Compare And Analyze Binary Files On Mac With Synalyze It!
Want to check the content of a binary file to make suitable amendments but can’t find the right text editor which has an ability to view and modify the values? You need a Hex editor to open and modify binary files. Apart from changing binary values, Hex editors do much more. For instance, you must have noticed that many applications save settings and other important values which reflect user-defined preferences, in a binary file. Since the only way to change those values is by launching the application and tweak with pre-configured options (if allowed), but even if you’re not permitted to do so, you can take a chance with changing values manually by opening the respective binary file in a Hex Editor.
Synalyze It! for Mac is developed to fulfill such need of power users. It creates a grammar for binary files in order to analyze them in an interactive manner. The grammars are stored as XML files, containing structures of certain file format. You can inherit the pre-listed structures, just as one can inherit functions in OOP languages, to avoid writing each function repeatedly in different locations of file. Synalyze It! is filled with all the features of a Hex Editor, letting you modify, compare and analyze the content with an ease.
From the product page, you can download grammars for some well-known formats, such as, AFP (Advanced Function Presentation), BMP (Bitmap Image), Dofus (Dofus Localization), EMF (Windows Enhanced Metafile), WAV (Windows Wave File) and lot more. After the installation, it will prompt you to open a file to view and compare contained code or create a new grammar for a file format. Just click Open file and choose a binary file that you want to view and analyze.
For each selected value in viewer, it shows Hex values for Start, End, Length and Content at the bottom of the window. At right-side, original code contained in a file is displayed. A right-click on value will let you find values, compare code pages and save the selection made.
Each value can be compared with original text, number, Mask and in original Strings form. For instance, take 5A, it will show all the occurrences of 5A in the aforementioned forms.
From the menu bar View menu, you can change the default Line Off-set from Hex to Decimal, Octal, and Line Number, show codepage comparison, and bring up histogram to view all the Hex, Decimal, Octal values and check out total count and percentage of occurrences. Hovering mouse over histogram will show Hex value along with total count and percentage of point in question.
Synalyze It! offers not only Hex editor but an efficient binary file analysis mechanism with tools to compare values. Did we mention that you can print Hex view with or without text and mapped structures. You can review each provided feature in details from the product feature page. It works on Mac 10.5 – 10.6.
