Two of the biggest feature requests that we've been receiving from users of DiffNow, the free online file comparison utility, have been the ability to store your comparison options and a place to view all of your saved diff reports. Today we're unveiling both of these features, in the form of user accounts.

What advantages does having a DiffNow account give? At the moment there are several:

• Your options are tied to your account, so you only have to change them once rather than every time you visit DiffNow.
• All of your shared diff reports can be viewed in a Saved Reports dialog, so you no longer have to worry about losing the report URLs.
• You can also title your diff reports when you save them, for more convenient organization.

Registration only takes a minute and is of course perfectly free. We are also planning on adding more features to user accounts in the future, such as more advanced comparison options. Be sure to let us know if you have any feature suggestions on our UserVoice forum. Happy diffing!

We are pleased to announce that ExamDiff Pro 6.0 is released!

This release has all of the features of the 6.0 beta, including:

• three-way diff and merge
• quick view filters
• redesigned HTML diff reports, with improved diff navigation and selection
• overall difference navigation commands
• Windows 8 support

and many more features and improvements.

Starting today, ExamDiff Pro is available in Standard and Master editions. In version 6.0, the one big feature added in the Master Edition is three-way diff and merge. In the future, there will be new features added to both editions, and the Master Edition will always include all of the features of the Standard Edition.

You can find more details about ExamDiff Pro 6.0, as well as a download link, here.

ExamDiff Pro makes it very easy to compare COBOL files by allowing you to ignore comments. In COBOL files, if an asterisk is in position 7 of a line, then the rest of the line is a considered a comment. This rule can be expressed in the following regular expression: (?<=^.{6})\*.*?\n . 

Let's use it to define a new COBOL document type: go to Options | Document Types, click on New, enter "COBOL" as the type name and "cbl" as the extension (you can have more than one extension there), and type our regular expression for comments: 

 

After you click OK and compare two COBOL files, their comments will be ignored (don't forget to check the Ignore Comments checkbox under Options | Text Compare).

Bonus tip: If your files have numbers with leading zeroes (e.g. 00008) in one file and without (e.g. 8) -- in the other file, you will get much better comparison results if you ask ExamDiff Pro to ignore zeros that precede other digits. The following regular expression will do the job: \b0*(?=\d). You need to enter it in the Ignore parts of each line | Parts matching regular expression edit box in Options | Text Compare:
 

 

The ExamDiff Pro 6.0 beta introduces some significant changes to how HTML diff reports look and feel, to make them more closely resemble the main ExamDiff Pro window.

Compare this HTML diff report from version 6.0:

to the old report from previous versions:

The most immediately noticeable change is the addition of diff bars in the file panes. Just like within ExamDiff Pro, clicking anywhere within a file pane will select the closest difference by marking its diff bar yellow and by displaying its summary in the diff selector. The selector itself is now prominently positioned at the top, rather than in the bottom-right corner as before, and displays summaries like "Diff 1: Delete 4 lines (1 - 4, first file) before line 1 (second file)" rather than just difference numbers.

Also, when you select a new difference in the selector or use the navigation controls (First / Previous / Next / Last), the selected diff will now be shown in the center of the screen (if possible), rather than being moved to the top of the screen as before. This makes the navigation controls in the report function exactly as they do within ExamDiff Pro.

We've found these usability changes to make a big improvement to the ease-of-use of diff reports. It's now easier than ever to navigate between differences within them, making them a great solution for those times when you need to share a diff report with colleagues or simply save one for yourself for future reference.

By the way, we've already updated DiffNow, our online ExamDiff Pro-powered file comparison utility, to use the new diff report template. If you haven't heard of DiffNow yet, be sure to check it out! It's handy for quickly comparing text fragments, files, or URLs and sharing results with just a few clicks.

We are pleased to announce that we've just released a beta of ExamDiff Pro 6.0!

The biggest new feature in version 6.0 is our most-requested feature to date: three-way diff and merge. In three-way merge, three files are compared - a base file and two revision files ("yours" and "theirs") that are both modifications of the base - and the goal is to reconcile the changes made in the revision files into an output file. ExamDiff Pro allows for both intelligent automatic merge resolution and manual merge resolution with an easy-to-use interface, as shown above.

ExamDiff Pro 6.0 Beta also introduces a number of features aimed at improving usability. The quick view filters panel allows you to filter the display to show only differences, only identical items, or only newer/older files, without having to go to the View Filter settings. The overall difference navigation commands offer a convenient way to navigate between all differences, inline or not. The HTML diff report has undergone a major overhaul to improve diff navigation and selection, which I will write about soon. New document types have been added for Ruby, JavaScript, and CSS, and ExamDiff Pro 6.0 Beta also adds Windows 8 support.

You can find more details about the 6.0 beta, and a download link, here.