History

Expert Commercial Software was founded in 1995 by Andrew Phillips and Annette Phillips.  The company provides consultation and software development services in the Sydney region.  In 2000 the company also took on the marketing of the shareware product HexEdit 1.1 which was originally developed by Andrew Phillips and released as open source software (as HexEdit 1.0) in 1999.

In 2011 the shareware version was renamed HexEdit Pro.  The open source version continues to use the name HexEdit (currently HexEdit 4.0).

HexEdit

The HexEdit program since its first release has been at the forefront of innovation in software for editing binary files.  It was the first to introduce a number of features such as unlimited undo, background searches, powerful calculator, etc.  It was also the first with a powerful template system that has since been copied by other programs.  More recently many users have also come to appreciate the power of the "aerial view" feature.

Despite, or in addition to, its innovations HexEdit has always been very easy to use and very reliable.

An overriding design principle is that, whenever possible, the software should behave in a way that users of other common Windows programs (such as Microsoft Office and Visual Studio) are familiar.

The free and shareware versions of HexEdit have been downloaded and used by millions of people.  We are proud that in that time only once has a user reported a bug that caused the software to fail with a run-time error.  Unlike other hex editors there has never been a bug in any version of HexEdit that caused any sort of file corruption.

Philosophy

Our principle of software development is to provide the highest quality software by doing things right (the first time).  Over three decades of working with C and C++ Andrew has developed an approach to design and coding that provides a high level of reliability.

Of course, good software also has to be useful.  Many users have commented on how easy our software is to use.  For example, HexEdit includes many powerful features that simply make things easier with little or no effort on the part of the software user (such as background searches).  Further, we have gratefully received and incorporated ideas from users -- for example, color schemes (which have become an integral part of HexEdit) were added after feedback on HexEdit 1.0.

Many of the features that have been added to HexEdit over the years depend on open source libraries.  In return we have always tried to provide a recent version of the software as open source so that it could possibly assist others.