15-Minute Reviews :: AptEdit Pro v3.7.2b222

Hello all and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s title is AptEdit version 3.7.2b222 by Brother Technology, Inc – A raw text editor as well as hex-editor as well.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“AptEdit is a 32-bit full-featured text / hexadecimal professional editor for Windows 2000/XP/2003/Vista. It offers many powerful features to view and edit any file (text or binary). And it is also an excellent source editor for Web page authors and programmers.

Text/binary files comparison and merging, full Unicode support, HEX template, edit disk drives, seamless Web browser, function list, EBCDIC to ASCII, OEM to ANSI, convert to html (WYSIWYG), customizable keyboard shortcuts, favorite files, and so on.”

Quick Pros

• File compare functionality works well
• Project functionality useful
• Syntax highlighting and collapsing for a good number of languages
• Many text-formatting options available
• Hex editor very powerful including physical drive editing

Quick Cons

• Crashed on reboot after installing serial key
• Interface a bit awkward to use in places
• Would keep crashing every time I tried to edit a text file
• FTP functionality does not support Secure FTP
• Application took over association of .txt files

Expansion

My problems with this title started pretty early on. When I first launched this application, it brought up the Name/Serial dialog box. After I inputted these, the application stated it would reboot. As the application launched itself again, the application promptly crashed. The application manually launched when I manually launched it and it kept its registration information.

While the interface and the application offers a lot of powerful features, the button bars along the top are significantly overcrowded, leading to ‘hunting’ for buttons very quickly. While what bars are present are up to you (A total of 7 button bars), they do not auto-arrange themselves, so you end up having to manually rearrange your bars each time you change them with no save option, which would be a nuisance if you change from a web development button bar set to a more hex-friendly button bar set. Many of the buttons found on the button bars are also likely low-use for most people and really should be confined to the menus themselves. The workspace bar on the left side of the screen starts out a bit awkward – You can’t see all the tabs on the bottom unless you use the scroll arrows, or resize the window even larger, using up a good deal of screen real-estate while you’re at it. It may be an idea to memorize the key combination to hide/show it. Besides these two issues, the rest of the interface is pretty easy to work with and does pose as a typical text or hex editor, and is very easy to use (see notes below on crash issues however).

There is a lot of nice functionality in this application; I’m going to touch on the few that were more interesting. First off, the file compare functionality is pretty interesting, and works much like many other editors I’ve used as of recently but functions quite nicely none the less. The color-highlighting is easy to spot, and moving around is fairly straightforward too with key commands for most of the process.

The project functionality is an interesting way to keep organized all the files you’re working on in a project; This may be especially useful if your files are not all in the same directory, or spread between local, network and FTP. The application adds all the files you denote to the Project tab of the Workspace bar for easy access as well.

Another nice feature is the syntax highlighting and code collapsing, as well as handling formatting of the text. I know when I start building large blocks of code, I much prefer to hide code that I just do not need to work on right now; Whether it be a complete function, a div area of a site like a navigation area or similar, I always found this helped with productivity. The code highlighting is similar to other applications as well. There are a lot of options for handling text as well which gives options such as indentation, converting spaces and tabs and much more.

Finally, must touch on the hex editor. It works very well; It highlights code you have altered or moved as well as all the other common hex functionality. There is also functionality built-in to edit drives as well, and not just single files. I didn’t have a lot of time to go into the hex editor side of things but from my testing, it seems to work quite well.

All wasn’t grand however. I didn’t have any issues with the hex editor side of the application; However, when I started testing the text editor, I quickly found some serious issues. I attempted to create two quick files for using the file compare functionality, but found very quickly I was going to start crashing quickly. The first time I hit ‘Enter’, a new line number popped up, but the cursor did not move down and instead stayed where it was. When I’d move down the line, enter some text and go back up, the application crashes. Various combinations of keypresses after you hit enter the first time crashed the application totally with only a Windows ‘has encountered a problem and needs to close’ dialog box. This was not the worst issue, because you could learn to work around this. Every time I would go to delete something, the application would not visibly delete it. Using backspace a few times in a row will guarantee a crash. If you hit delete once or twice, then start typing, it will sometimes work, but at some point after hitting backspace, the application will shortly fail. The only workaround I could find was to hit backspace, then up (or down), then the character would delete. I would have to repeat this a few times as well. Every time I deleted the last character on a line however, as soon as I hit up or down, the application crashes again. At this point, the text editing is not functional at all for me.

A few other notes I must add. There is no Secure FTP support, which is truly needed on most applications these days to protect developer’s websites from middleman attacks, which are becoming all too common now. As well, the application took over my .txt files with its own association. It wouldn’t have been bad, however it left no way to undo it in the associations portion of the help; It doesn’t even list the association in itself at all.

Final Verdict

This application wouldn’t be too bad of a title if the crashbugs weren’t so invasive. Granted, the application could use some reworking to make it a little easier to get around, it could be workable. For free, if you don’t get the crashbugs during text editing, this application may be an application to try out and compare to alternatives. As for paying $59.95 for this title, even without the crashbugs, I would likely not be able to recommend this title; The price is just too high for what is offered. There are alternatives out there: Notepad++ – An open-source powerful text editor; Aptana – A great free web development platform; As well as HexEdit – Offers much of the same functionality as AptEdit and there is both the current version for $40, or the previous version for free.

Posted by BladedThoth on Tuesday, September 18, 2007