

Kaleidoscope - File comparison for Mac released - pstinnett
http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/

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raimondious
If you're using a Webkit browser, notice the app icon over time.

They use these images for that effect in CSS:

<http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/static/img/ks_color.png> ,
<http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/static/img/ks_shading.png> ,
<http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/static/img/ks_mask.png>

Lack of merge support is a deal-breaker for me. I was so hopeful because
that's the #1 most requested feature in their other app, Versions.

~~~
koenbok
Good catch :-) I hoped somebody would notice it...

We know about merging. One step at a time...

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raimondious
I know you won't answer this, but do you think it will come to Kaleidoscope
faster than it's come to Versions? (how long has Versions been out? 2 years?)
Or, when it comes to Kaleidoscope, will you use that functionality in
Versions?

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pclark
Versions has barely been updated since launch.

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elliottcable
Obvious solution: Stop using SVN. Versions is a great app, but it’s long since
time to move on.

That said, Kaleidoscope is pretty neat! :D

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obeattie
Absolutely beautiful UI, icon and website… but it doesn't do merge resolution.
This is practically all I use opendiff (Filemerge) for, so it's useless for
me. Add it, and my €29 are yours in a heartbeat — I tend to do lots of merges,
and I find this is one of the very few cases where a proper desktop app can
make the job so much easier than a command-line tool like vimdiff/emacs. And
let's face it, Filemerge is pretty horrid… having to quit the entire app to
move onto the next conflict and watch as it spews SIMBL errors over your
terminal is hardly ideal.

~~~
frou_dh
Man, no merge capabilities is a bummer. I was rooting through the menu items
and help viewer in vain.

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jason_slack
Sofa sort of has a slow track record for releasing updates. They tend to just
fizzle out.

Anyone remember Disco? They released one version and a few small updates,
people bought it, they HAVE NEVER DONE ANYTHING ELSE TO IT.

Versions is in the same boat. I doubt there will be a 2.0 release of it
either.

~~~
st3fan
Same with Versions indeed. I asked for some really simple improvements. All
were promised more than a year ago. None appeared in any update.

~~~
jason_slack
I hope they can turn around this trend. They make great stuff.

I liked Disco a lot and it helped me out. Then it stopped.

So I wrote my own, getting ready to release soon.

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boucher
The title doesn't really give you much to go on, but the app is incredibly
well done. It diffs all kinds of binary image formats like PNG, JPG or even
PSD.

Oh, and the product website is amazingly beautiful too.

~~~
unwind
Personally, I found the super-fast "shake"-like effect when you click what you
think is a link to be very distracting. It also breaks "back", you need to
hunt for and learn to use the "Top" button in the top _right_ corner of those
pages.

~~~
bradleyland
It's not a shake effect, but a scroll effect (jQ scroll-to plug-in). The
appearance of shake occurs because the scroll rate is higher than your browser
can render smoothly.

The site uses a paginated, single-page model with sections styled with
significant design differences for each "page". When clicking a link (they're
not actually links [boooo!]), a JS scroll event is triggered. Some relatively
straight-forward tweaks could fix this.

The author uses span tags to wrap elements that act like links. A far more
appropriate markup would use an anchor tag with a fragment identifier
(#fragment-id). The span tags that are currently in use use class names to
identify the "location" of the target. This is, again, poor form. A URL is the
tool for specifying location, and URLs are linked using the anchor tag.

HTML Excerpt 1:

<div class="wrap"> <span class="scroll_to_text">Text Scope</span> <p>Compare
text and source code.</p> </div>

Change to:

<div class="wrap"> <a href="#text">Text Scope</a> <p>Compare text and source
code.</p> </div>

JS Excerpt 1:

$(".scroll_to_text").click(function()
{$.scrollTo($("#text").position().top-40, 300)});

Change to:

$("#text").click(function(event) {$.scrollTo($("body").position().top,
300);event.preventDefault();});

I'm a novice HTML/Javascript guy at best, so the code above may not function
correctly in production, but I'm certain that the principle is appropriate.

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robryan
Amazing website design, love the attention to design that quality mac apps get
in comparison to windows ones.

~~~
sid0
Beyond Compare 3 -- which I'm a _really_ happy user of -- seems to be much
more powerful. For example, it can actually merge files. And there's clearly
been a ton of attention paid to its design.

~~~
kenshi
Beyond Compare is amazing. The only app I miss from Windows. If you are on
Windows, and haven't used it, you are missing out.

~~~
andybak
Beyond compare if fantastic. If you miss it that much then you can run it
nicely under Wine/Darwine/Crossover etc. I've been using Deltawalker on the
Mac which is nice if a little brittle sometimes. It sucks hugely for FTP/SFTP
compares though.

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petewarden
It's just for text files, but opendiff is a pretty nice GUI diff that gets
quietly installed as part of the Developer Tools package on OS X:

<http://data.agaric.com/node/1101>

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Ixiaus
It's a beautiful application, the one thing it does that Emacs can't is the
binary image diffing - a cool feature! If I were a designer I would buy that
in a heart beat...

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far33d
I use Araxis Merge. It's expensive but it's hands-down, the best merge / diff
utility I've ever used. All the rest look and feel like toys in comparison.

~~~
jawngee
I use Araxis as well. Cross platform too.

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rnicholson
Seems nice. Although, just makes me wish Beyond Compare was available on the
Mac as a native app.

~~~
waleedka
+1

I tested a lot of compare utilities for Mac and finally settled on running a
virtual box with Windows on it so I can run BeyondCompare. This app looks
promising, though. For me, a killer missing feature is the folder compare
view.

~~~
rnicholson
Yeah the only thing that found that is close for Mac is Changes -
<http://connectedflow.com/changes/>

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st3fan
Expensive. Is it really that much better than Apple's FileMerge?

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ttol
these are from the same guys that made Versions
(<http://www.versionsapp.com>), the subversion app for mac

~~~
lylejohnson
Yes, the Subversion app that _still_ doesn't provide a merge capability
despite users' requests for it year after year.

Kaleidoscope does look beautiful (not unlike Versions), but given Sofa's track
record I wouldn't hold out much hope for support after the initial release.

~~~
st3fan
I switched to Cornerstone. Not that I use SVN that much anymore .. but some
clients still do. Cornerstone is much more pragmatic about features. Like drag
and drop simply works.

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funkdobiest
Does anybody remember the original Kalediscope for Macs. It was awesome for a
different look other than Mac OS defaults. I suppose it went away with the
classic OS.

~~~
dirkstoop
Yeah that was really cool :)

I vividly remember the Scherzo theme; who could erase that memory? ;)

We emailed Greg and Arlo (authors of the classic Kaleidoscope) to see if they
were cool with us repurposing the name and they were, you'll find their names
in our app's About window.

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makecheck
And it even comes with a command-line tool...amazing.

I really like seeing developers put in this kind of effort. Maybe Apple will
choose to package it with a future version of Xcode. :)

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abstractwater
The website design is so beautiful and visually striking that even if I don't
have a strong need for Kaleidoscope, it really makes me want to try it.

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whalesalad
It actually won't work for me at all. `git difftool` does not exist anywhere,
and I can't even pipe a normal diff to it like `git diff HEAD | ksdiff`

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klaaspieter
I've been using `git difftool` and `ksdiff` for more than half a year now and
it works perfectly.

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mcantor
I absolutely love the use of the scroll effect. It feels very smooth and
natural (Chrome).

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sdutoit
Crashes on startup for me - hopefully they'll get the stack trace I sent.

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kissickas
Why did DynDNS say this was a phishing website?

~~~
diskrete
Yep. We had the same problem. I had to use a different Internet connection to
download it.

(I assumed it's not actually a phishing website based on the comments posted
here by users I respect.)

