Spent some time pocking around to find good tools for qualitative analysis in OSX. The winner is: HyperRESEARCH. At the end, it is the most stable, and up-to-date. The bad part is that is a commercial product, although they offer a free teaching version for teaching purpose.

The other candidates were:

TAMS: The TAMS (Text Analysis Markup System) Analyzer is an open source qualitative analysis system for OS X and GNUstep (Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc.). Screenshots, documentation, binaries and sourcecode available.

jATLAS: ATLAS (Architecture and Tools for Linguistic Analysis Systems) is issued from an initiative involving NIST, LDC and MITRE. ATLAS addresses an array of applications needs spanning corpus construction, evaluation infrastructure, and multi-modal visualization. The ATLAS framework provides an architecture targeted at facilitating the development of linguistic applications. The principal goal of ATLAS is to provide an abstraction over the diversity of linguistic annotations. The abstraction, which expands on Bird and Liberman’s Annotation Graphs (see the history below), is able to represent complex annotations on signals of arbitrary dimensionality.

Anvil is also a free video annotation tool. It offers frame-accurate, hierarchical multi-layered annotation driven by user-defined annotation schemes. The intuitive annotation board shows color-coded elements on multiple tracks in time-alignment. Special features are cross-level links, non-temporal objects and a project tool for managing multiple annotations. Originally developed for Gesture Research, Anvil has also proved suitable for research in Human-Computer Interaction, Linguistics, and many other fields. As it is dependent on Java Multimedia Framework is a bit picky in the supported codecs.