Synalyze It! Pro App Reviews

Really a great product! It features a lot of innovative functionnalities.

pros: best know hex editor for os x cons: price slightly too high

This is really mandatory if you happen to work with binary files and want to have a priceless aid in debugging/reversing. Very nice interface, easy enough to set-up as a beginner, but so powerful many power users wont regret using it. The author is very responsive and gives a premium support when asked for help by email

A very nice implementation which lets one analyze a file interactively. Gone are the days of needing to parse and highlight printouts. Developer is very responsive to questions. Also works as a good hex editor.

Thank you for the great tool! I really like having the ability to analyze and identify file structures on the fly. The use of assignable color and data segment properties has been very helpful. Also, I appreciated the great, but simple-to-follow tutorial on the Synalysis website. Well done!

Simply put, this is the best hex editor for OS X that I have been able to find so far, and I have been looking on and off the AppStore for some time. Analyzing file data structures is so much easier when you can color them in! Right now I am using Synalyze It! Pro to analyze and manipulate graphics files of various formats. Since each file I work with was created at some very specific point in the evolution of its format, the differences between any two files of a single format can be quite striking and/or very very very subtle. The custom grammars work very well to keep those changes from confusing me, especially on those days when my brain sleeps in but I want to work early. It is easy to use a grammar file as a pre-existing map and a developing diagram at the same time, and if, like me, you are changing different parts of the files you are working with, you can use a grammar sheet for that one file and scribble notes all over it. It is sort of like a byte-level visual project manager for me. I am working as an artist rather than as an engineer, and Synalyze It! Pro is the only hex editor I have actually been able to learn from simply by using it. The others--well, they show you the bytes, and you can change them, but they are not much help in deciphering structures so that you know which ones will break everything if you drop a byte and which ones will stand up to a little tinkering. Also, the color schemes are completely customizable. Maybe I am getting old, but I can no longer work with black text on blaring white backgrounds, so I am always looking for those foreground/background preferance panes. This has them! So very happy to have found this tool.

The app is great, but there are too few grammars regarding its price ($29.99). Actually there are about 50 grammars in this application. I buyed it for saving my time for googling binary formats and apply them manually, but now I think I’ll have to define a lot of grammars. Also I was suprised by that they have no grammar for jpeg format while having it for PS1 Save Games. Please pull off some new grammars for famous file formats. If so, this app will deserve 5-star.

Described in one word, indispensable. Synalyze it is much more than a hex editor. It’s like a logic logic analyzer for binary files. I would like for it to be able to compare and difference two files similar to Kaleidoscope, but for binary files, to see changes between two saved files, but missing that feature isn’t worth taking a star away, because it does more than any other hex editor I’ve ever used, and it does it all very well. It’s worth the extra cost for the pro version, I found very quickly that the scripting support is very much necessary.

Well, maybe I am exaggerating. Fact is, for me as a software developer and hacker, this is a must-have tool. The apps description already explains pretty well what it can do, and I can only confirm that its not only working well and offers free templates for many file formats (e.g, I often use the one for zip files when I need to figure out issues with some zip files). It also runs stable and has a responsive developer. Just what a developer needs.

I’ve been using Synalyze It! for years. It’s a definite "must have” tool in any computer programmer’s toolbox. Most recently I’ve used this tool to help me write a RTP H264 decoder. Without Synalyze It I would have been left groping in the dark. With it I was able to quickly and confidently confirm my assumptions. Great tool.