ADIF Editor

A native macOS editor for amateur radio ADIF log files, with purpose-built tools for Parks on the Air (POTA) activation logs.

Status: pre-release, under construction. See DESIGN.md for the full specification and CLAUDE.md for the invariants the implementation is held to.

What it's for

POTA activators log with contest and digital-mode software — WSJT-X, MSHV, N1MM — none of which know anything about POTA. The .adi files they produce are valid ADIF but lack the MY_SIG_INFO field carrying the park reference, which POTA's uploader needs. Every activation therefore requires the same manual edit: add a column, fill it with the park reference on every row, save under a specific filename. Activations from multiple parks at once ("n-fers") require that once per park, into separate files.

ADIF Editor makes that one button press — one park or ten, the same command, always writing new files and never touching the log that came off the radio.

Around that it does the editing a log actually needs:

• Grid editing. Every field of every QSO in a spreadsheet, with full undo. Columns sort on any header.
• Row selection and deletion. Real logs accumulate several sessions; trimming to the contacts that were part of the activation is part of preparing the upload. Cut, copy and paste move whole QSOs, as ADIF text.
• Find duplicates. QSOs that repeat, every one shown before any is removed.
• Fill from QRZ. Name, location and zone fields for callsigns you would otherwise type by hand. Empty cells only — it never overwrites something you entered.
• Find (⌘F). Across every column at once.

And underneath all of it, the guarantee the parser is built around: a file opened and saved without edits is byte-identical to the one that came in. Not merely field-preserving — identical, down to field-name casing, zero-length fields, line endings and header bytes. Vendor extensions and fields the app has never heard of survive untouched, because nothing it does not understand is ever rewritten.

The single exception is a field whose declared length is wrong: that gets written back correct, and the app tells you it did. Reproducing it faithfully would be preserving corruption rather than preserving data.

It is not a logger, and it never uploads your log anywhere — you upload to POTA yourself.

It makes exactly one kind of network connection: a QRZ callsign lookup, to fill in station details you would otherwise type by hand. It happens only when you invoke it, only if you have entered QRZ credentials, and it sends one callsign — never your log, never a file. With no credentials stored, the app never opens a connection at all. There is no telemetry, no update check, and no analytics.

Requirements

macOS 14 or later. Universal (Apple Silicon and Intel).

Building

Requires the Swift toolchain from Xcode or the Command Line Tools. No third-party dependencies.

swift build
Scripts/test.sh     # ADIFKit unit tests, including round-trip fidelity

Tests use swift-testing. Scripts/test.sh wraps swift test with the search paths Testing.framework needs when building against Command Line Tools without a full Xcode install; with Xcode present, plain swift test also works.

swift build compiles the code but does not produce a runnable Mac app — see Building the app from source below for that.

Installing

Download the latest .dmg from the Releases page. It is a universal build — Apple Silicon and Intel — and needs macOS 14 or later.

Open the .dmg and drag ADIF Editor onto the Applications shortcut beside it.

Building from source works too and is described below; the only thing it needs is Swift, since the project has no dependencies.

First launch: macOS will block it

It will. This is expected, and it is not a sign that anything is wrong with the download.

ADIF Editor is ad-hoc signed and not notarized. Notarizing requires a paid Apple Developer account, which this project does not have. macOS therefore treats the app as coming from an unidentified developer and refuses to open it the first time.

You have three ways past it. Pick one.

1. Open Anyway (no Terminal required)

1. Double-click ADIF Editor. macOS blocks it — dismiss the warning.
2. Open System Settings › Privacy & Security.
3. Scroll to the Security section. A message names ADIF Editor as having been blocked, with an Open Anyway button. Click it.
4. Confirm, and authenticate if asked.

You only do this once. On macOS 14 you can instead control-click the app and choose Open; that shortcut was removed in macOS 15, which is why the route above is the one documented here.

2. Remove the quarantine flag (one command)

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine "/Applications/ADIF Editor.app"

Then open it normally.

3. Build it yourself

If you would rather not run a binary you did not build — a reasonable position, and the intended answer to the signing question — see below. The app you build locally is not quarantined, so none of this applies to it.

Building the app from source

swift build alone produces a bare executable, which is not a Mac app: the document type associations live in Info.plist, and Apple Silicon refuses to run an unsigned arm64 binary at all. Scripts/bundle.sh assembles the bundle and ad-hoc signs it.

Scripts/bundle.sh            # debug, your architecture — for development
Scripts/bundle.sh release    # universal arm64 + x86_64, plus the .dmg

Both land in .build/. Either can be dragged to /Applications. The app you build yourself is not quarantined, so none of the first-launch steps above apply to it.

The icon is generated during the bundle step from Support/Icon/AppIcon-1024.png using sips and iconutil, both of which ship with macOS. There is no committed .icns, so the PNG is the only thing to change if you want a different icon.

If you are working on the project rather than just building it once, enable the pre-push hook:

git config core.hooksPath .githooks

It runs Scripts/ci-local.sh — a build and the full test suite — before every push. This is the project's primary check. Continuous integration deliberately does not run on pushes to main, so nothing on the server will catch what the hook misses until a release is built.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. See LICENSE.

In short: you may use, study, modify and share this program freely. If you distribute a modified version, you have to make your source available under the same terms — so this stays open for whoever comes after you. And, as with any licence of this kind, the program comes with no warranty of any kind; you use it at your own risk (GPL §§15–17).

Copyright © 2026 Tim Annable.

This is a clean-room implementation written against the public ADIF specification at adif.org. It is not derived from, affiliated with, or endorsed by any other ADIF editing tool.