New release: 3.4

AXE 3.4 is now finished! The focus of this release is on structures and bookmarks, which have become much more powerful. Features include:

Arrays: By popular request -- structures can now contain arrays (as well as many other new types
Dynamic Structures: Arrays, strings and other types can change length dynamically based on the underlying data
C-like Syntax: Structures and bookmarks are now specified in a readable C-like mini-language
Child Bookmarks: Bookmarks can now have children which move when the parent is moved
Typed Bookmarks: Bookmarks can now be associated with types, including structures
Multiple Library Files: You can maintain seperate files of structures and bookmarks and move them around without AXE interfering. It is now much easier to edit struct and bookmark libraries outside AXE.

There are also many general ergonomic improvements, including:

Caret Styles: You can now choose how the cursor is drawn, and optionally see it in more than one column at once.
Hilite: A new visual element, the hilile, matches areas of the document with the data entity (eg a structure member) you select.

Upgrading:

As usual, you can upgrade by just installing AXE 3.4 over your old copy. If you were already a registered user, your registration will work for 3.4 (and all other 3.* releases).

3.4 uses different data files from previous versions, so your old data files (XScripts.ini etc) will not be used any more.

If you want to guide future versions, please take the poll!

History:

What was new in 3.3

The main purpose of version 3.3 is to add three user-requested features:

Bookmark Archives: You can now save and load lists of bookmarks more easily.
EBCDIC: The text half of the normal view can now be set to EBCDIC as well as ASCII and Unicode(UCS2).
Simpler Licensing: AXE now just has a plain old serial number like most shareware; the old system was annoying.

Other major features:

Grammar Generator: This can be a powerful tool for finding structure and regularity in data whose format is not known
Quickview Windows: A new set of tabbed docking windows that tell you about the data under the caret at a glance.

Smaller features included statistical functions, new status bar indicators for clipboard contents, and a caret that now stops flashing when the window is unfocused.

What Was New In 3.2

Version 3.2 added a lot of usability features based on user feedback, and modernized/normalized some aspects of the interface. The two big changes were:

Search-and-Replace: The original 'Search, Mark, Arithmetic' technique from the original AXE is still there, but from 3.2, AXE has an ordinary search-and-replace feature as well.
Code sets: The character set selection dialog is gone. Now, you just use a regular font dialog (specifying the correct language) and AXE will guess the relevant code page from the font characteristics.

Small features included:

When you cut (Ctrl-C) bytes from the main byte display, an ASCII representation of those bytes will be put on the clipboard, so you can paste it into Notepad or into the Base Convertor.
When you do a search, you can now bookmark matches.
Searching can no longer find 'overlapping' matches.
Bookmarks in Graphical View are filtered more intelligently so that only bookmarks that refer to a location that is currently visible are displayed.
Normal and Graphical views no longer have to have the same number of bytes per row.
Performing operations that involve a lot of bookmarks is now quicker.
It is possible to get rid of the decoration in the main windows background.

In addition, there were many changes to the way mouse selection, dragging etc work in AXE, in accordance with the general rule that AXE should behave as much like the Visual Studio editor as possible.

What Was New In Version 3.1:

The 3.1 release fixed a number of annoying or ugly things left over from the version 2 days.

The problem whereby moving one window over another could cause annoying graphical debris on some systems is fixed
Color settings (menu Edit/Options/Colors...) are enhanced a little to allow light-on-dark schemes
Exporting and re-importing bookmarks no longer puts them in random order
Some problems with syncing the bookmarks/structures trees with documents have been fixed
There is now a 128-byte limit on the length of raw hex areas and strings in structures
Various small problems that nobody noticed are fixed

What Was New In Version 3.0:

3.0 was a huge release that added a vast amount of functionality over the version 2 series. AXE 2.1 users found the following major improvements:

Ability to handle very large files easily
'Expressions', i.e. scripts, supplement the old 'Arithmetic' feature
A new, more ergonomic interface to structures, scripts and bookmarks
Edit memory and physical disks
CRC generator, better calculator, quick string replace dialog
All known bugs fixed