

Show HN: Revisions – version control for dropbox (mac app) - phoyer
https://www.revisionsapp.com

======
phoyer
Developer here. Would love to hear your comments, and happy to answer any
questions you might have.

The idea is not to compete with formal version control systems (such as git),
but rather to provide a nice interface to the "events" and "previous versions"
functionality of dropbox. This allows users to track changes to files
(including viewing diffs of changes) and easily restore an entire directory if
desired. Might even be useful for serious hackers when collaborating on files
with friends/relatives who don't use git... :)

(As always, don't put your most precious secrets in dropbox. Or if you must,
encrypt them before you do.)

~~~
wib
Cool app. I was looking for something exactly like this yesterday and I was
surprised no one had made it yet. Your UI is nice, but the icons are a little
crowded on the view activity panel. Also it took me a minute to figure out
what "group threshold" does (actually I'm still not sure how grouping works).

Suggestions:

\- A filter to ignore certain files within a subfolder (regex or strict
selection would be fine)

\- Express time in relative as well as absolute terms (ie, "five minutes ago,"
"two days ago," etc.)

\- For premium: A built-in diff viewer for those of us who haven't paid for
Kalidescope, etc. Maybe you could integrate Mergely (mergely.com)?

The only other thing: I hate the App Store and I'm not alone. It'd be great if
you integrated the premium payment option with the direct-download version and
added it to the (Home)brew cask repos.

Good work.

~~~
phoyer
Thanks for the feedback!

Yes, will definitely need to do a better job explaining how grouping works
(and perhaps also fine-tune how it actually does work). Currently the time
setting (e.g. the default 10 minutes) is the time threshold between successive
edits for grouping edits together. Note that this only affects grouping while
the table is loading, it does not update existing groups. The "Group" button
groups the whole selection together, while the "Ungroup" button shatters the
whole selection into individual atomic edits. It's a bit complicated and could
definitely need some work still, but I feel something similar to this is
needed to provide an easy default overview of edits but also allow users to
fine-tune to view the exact diffs that they wish to see. Any further
suggestions here would be more than welcome.

Ignoring certain filenames based on regexp is coming soon, probably already in
1.2.1, within a week or two. (This has been suggested by several users.)

With regards to diff viewers: I'm trying to offload diffs to existing
software. Currently, all the supported diff viewers cost money, so am
definitely looking into connecting with existing free apps as soon as
possible. There is at least Apple's FileMerge (though it is cumbersome to
obtain since it only comes as part of Xcode), other suggestions are welcome!
I'll look into integrating Mergely as well.

Finally, will definitely be adding the ability to purchase the premium version
outside of the Mac App Store. I'm not a big fan of the store myself. (I'm
trying to combat some of the existing problems of the store by having separate
web download versions that can read the App Store receipt. This helps for
instance if the user would like to install the latest update without waiting
for App Store review to go through.) Will need to look into (Home)brew as
well.

~~~
phoyer
To whoever stumbles upon this thread: version 1.2.1 is now out (now live at
revisionsapp.com and mac app store version in review) and introduces the
following two main new features

\- Ignoring certain files and folders based on regular expression match (note:
premium-only feature)

\- Ability to launch any diff app (including Apple FileMerge), by calling a
custom AppleScript script (this also gets around the restrictions imposed by
the app sandbox). Sample script for FileMerge provided.

Correcting my earlier post, actually TextWrangler (one of the natively
supported diff apps) is free of charge, and now with the custom diff script
users can connect to other free diff apps as well (such as FileMerge).

Will soon be adding the possibility to purchase Premium functionality outside
the Mac App Store, probably within a week or so.

