Nexus Data Editor running on Mac OS X

In an earlier post I expressed my amazement that my venerable Nexus Data Editor (NDE) still had users, meaning I had to rebuild the installer so users could install NDE on Windows Vista. Now, Thomas Hauser has gone one better and created an installer for Mac OS X. Given that NDE is a Windows-only program, this is quite a feat. Thomas uses Mike Kroenenberg's (@k3erg) WineBottler to create a version of NDE that can be run on a Mac. WineBottler builds on Wine, which enables Windows software to run on Unix-like operating systems.

To run NDE on a Mac, first download WineBottler from http://winebottler.kronenberg.org/ and install. Then grab the file NDE.dmg Thomas has created. Install the file NDE in your Applications file and run it. Note that you will need X11 installed on your Mac. If you don't have this it should be on the installation disk that came with your computer. After a short pause you should see NDE appear in a X11 window. Below is a screen shot showing NDE editing the example file (Bembidion.nex) that comes with the program:

Many thanks to Thomas for his efforts in packaging NDE with Winebottler, and for making available the NDE.dmg file he created.

Nexus Data Editor and Windows Vista

Sometimes it's just amazing/frightening how long a piece of software remains useful. I wrote Nexus Data Editor (NDE) in the late 1990's, mainly to keep my then PhD student Vince Smith happy. Vince was constructing a morphological dataset for lice, and he didn't like Macs (in those days, he's seen the light now), and even if he did MacClade didn't allow him to wax lyrical about character states, so I wrote NDE for Windows (in those days this meant Windows 95 and NT). Vince and other students found it useful, so I wrote a manual and released it.

Turns out people still use NDE, but it doesn't install on Vista. I finally bit the bullet and put a installed a copy of Vista in VM Fusion on my MacBook, and confirmed that the installation was broken. Fearing I'd have to compile NDE for Vista (a challenge as it was built using the wonderful Borland 5.02 C++ compiler and IDE, now defunct). Turns out, it's the install package itself that's broken (built using Install Shield). The Inno Setup installer I use for TreeView X works fine, however.

The upshot is, if you use(d) NDE and have Vista, download a new copy of NDE from the web site, and it should work. Thanks to Mike Polcyn at the Southern Methodist University, Dallas, for the prompting that finally got this done.