Rogue Wolves

Somehow I missed this but I noticed ZigVersion mentioned in an Apple Developer Connection email recently and that it is now 1.0! Congrats!

I did a quick review of ZigVersion a while back and I have been using the beta version off and on for my own personal projects ever since. It's a great simple to use graphical Subversion client for OS X.

From the website:

ZigVersion is a Version Control interface for Mac developers that works with Subversion servers. Instead of simply reproducing the command line concepts as a graphical interface, we looked at the typical workflows of professional programmers and designed an interface around them.

Note that it isn't open source and requires a valid license. However, you can use it for a trial period to see how you like it first. I'd recommend they lower the commercial license cost as it's a bit high and might chase off potential customers (particularly small independent developers). They have promised to offer a free non-commercial license in the future.

You can see ZigVersion profiled on the Apple Development Tools Download page.

I was recently contacted by Erik Scrafford from ZigZig Software about my previous post Subversion on OS X. He informed me of another Subversion client that his company makes called ZigVersion. I decided to download it and give it a try.

First impressions:

• Very clean intuitive interface. (SvnX is a bit more cumbersome with it's multiple windows and harder to find features.)
• It just works. No fighting with it to connect to my repository.
• It shows me file statuses in the browser window. Right there no clicking to find it. It updates automatically with no refresh necessary.
• It does lack the ability to manually show differences or changes made to files or aid in merging file changes. I figured out I can try a checkin to find out what I changed as my next bullet points out. (With SvnX I have a FileMerge option which launches Apples fantastic FileMerge tool)
• On checkin it shows a window that displays all files changed and when you click on them it shows the differences from the last version! Nice job! Making it easy for developers to see what they have changed quickly is a great way to help eliminate stupid bad checkins and increase productivity.
• No Drag and Drop capabilities. I'd like to be able to drag and drop files/directories to the Finder to do checkouts and be able to drag and drop from the Finder to do checkins. Would also be awesome to be able to drag and drop in the repository to move things around.
• I could not see how to add new projects/folders to my repository? Do I have to do a checkout/checkin of everything just to add a folder?
• Is it possible to checkout a previous version or revert a file to version x?

ZigVersion is still in beta but it looks promising as a streamlined Subversion client that is simple to use and just works. There is, however, one other problem I see with ZigVersion: the name. Maybe it's a small thing but ZigVersion will always show up LAST in any software listing. Those damn Z's get you every time.

Good Luck to ZigVersion I'll definitely keep my eye on this. Thanks for the heads up Erik.

I recently made the jump to using Subversion as my version control system for my various software projects. If you haven't made the jump I'd recommend you consider it and say goodbye to all your CVS headaches. Check out this article on Subversion tips for CVS users. If you use Visual Source Safe you have my sympathies and you have even more reason to checkout Subversion... (yes that was a horrible pun)

But this post isn't about being a Subversion cheerleader, it's about finding good tools for Subversion on OS X. You can install Subversion for OS X by downloading Martin Ott's Subversion package. This will give you the command line subversion tools, but who wants to work solely on the command line? Thanks to a post by Boris Mann I found out about SvnX - a nice GUI front-end for the command line tools. Install both these and you have some nice tools to work with Subversion. The best part it's all free.

I also found a Subversion client for OS X called SCPlugin that integrates into the Finder similiar to TortoiseSVN for the Windows shell. It looked pretty cool BUT it doesn't appear to be in active development. The last news was from 2004 so I don't know what state the project is in. I was scared to install something that integrates into the Finder that might not be stable...