The Daydream Blog

Note this article is intended for developers and may be of limited interest to our wider client base.

Last week saw the release of Cornerstone, a new Subversion GUI client for the Mac from Zennaware. After initial testing, I am quite excited about Cornerstone, as it breaks new ground for Version Control Graphical Clients.

Historically, graphical version control clients have simply put a GUI on top of the command line tools. It is disappointing that there is little or no thought given to the problems that developers want to solve with their source control systems. Developers of these applications seem to completely forget the issues they themselves face.

Cornerstone’s most impressive feature and one that I have discussed extensively in the #macsb IRC channel is it’s timeline. You can easily go forward and back through the history of a file and see changes for each subsequent version. Whilst this falls short of my wishes for a source control timeline, it is a massive step in the right direction.

Cornerstone’s source code diff tool looks great, but still cannot identify when a method has simply moved within a file. If you change the method as well as move it, which is quite common, the changes are not clearly highlighted in Cornerstone, Xcode or any other diff tool I have come across on the Mac. I had already decided that a future version of Differencia will act as a source-code aware diff tool.

Whilst there are a long list of feature requests I have already for Cornerstone, after only a day’s use, it is a huge relief to find that someone is taking source control seriously.

There is one feature, in all of the apps that I use, that continues to impress me and makes a huge difference to my workflow. CSSEdit from MacRabbit does what it says on the tin – it edits CSS files, that define layout for modern web pages. For initiates, CSS seems like some arcane data file format pre-dating XML, but CSSEdit makes it easy to master.

Selecting a numerical field in CSSEdit such as Margin, Padding or Width, allows you to adjust the positioning of elements on your webpage. The live preview shows your changes immediately.

But the stand out feature is that if you hover your mouse over the selected field, you can use the mouse’s scroll wheel to adjust the value. This makes it phenomenally easy to fine tune the position of elements, to make them pixel perfect.

I primarily use Coda for my web development and although Coda has a built in CSS editor, it just doesn’t compare to CSSEdit. Which is perhaps why Panic, Coda’s creators, wanted to include CSSEdit within Coda, in the same way as they incorporate SubEthaEdit as the text editor in the app. It is a shame the two parties were not able to come to an agreement.

Here’s kudos to MacRabbit for great attention to detail, that makes a huge difference to users. Whilst Mac software developers need to remember the 80-20 rule to deliver, we still need to remember the other 20%. It should only been delayed to deliver the 80%, but still needs to be tackled to make our apps that extra bit special for our users.

DayTime is taking part in its first promotion, the Easter mEgg Hunt. Find the hidden eggs on participating website and get 20% off great Mac software. As you’re hunting around for the code for the software you want, you will hopefully find some hidden software gems as well.

There’s an egg somewhere on this site and to start looking for more, click on the image below: