h3. Why use subversion?

At my workplace we have a bunch of graphic designers and a bunch of developers. I’m somewhere in between. And there’s always the problem when the designer, or client, or manager, wants some graphical changes done. The designer makes the change, uploads to server or emails it, front-end guy (me) adds it to the stylesheet, emails new CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) and image to the back-end developer who then tests it on his (sorry, no female developers her) local test-server, and then finally uploads it to the live page.

You don’t have to be a rocket-scientist to see that this isn’t a streamlined process. With a subversion client that takes out the ‘hacking’ bits, the graphic designers will be willing to use it. I, and everyone else, will immediately see the change and voila! No more going through emails to see who did what when.

!http://thatnorwegianguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/cornerstoneversions1.jpg (Cornerstone and Versions logo in dock)!

You see, I’m a front-end kinda guy. I like things with a nice GUI, and I believe that anything that can be done in the terminal will eventually get an upgrade to something more user-friendly. But not so with subversion. There were never any native Mac-clients. I used some cross-OS java application for a while, but it never stuck. About a year ago I came across the splash-page for Versions, and I tell you – the logo alone left me longing for this new app, so I signed up for the private beta and completely forgot about it.

h3. Cornerstone vs. Versions

Until a couple of weeks ago. One newsletter later I had installed “Versions”:http://www.versionsapp.com/ and was using it for what (I think) it’s worth, and was happy as a clam. A couple of days later I was in for another surprise. “Cornerstone”:http://www.zennaware.com/cornerstone/ popped up on the interwebs. From having nothing, zero, nill, subversion apps, there was now two. That’s like getting two different iPhones at once. So I had to try them both offcourse.

Now keep in mind that my way of testing this does not go very deep, since I have close to zero previous experience with subversion. I’ve simply used them both, and based which one I like the most more or less by my gut feeling.

h3. And the winner is Cornerstone

I don’t have a great understanding of trunks, repositories and working copies. But they are vital for using subversion. With Versions I needed some help getting these things working, whereas with Cornerstone I managed to set it up myself by trial and error. Versions told me to install “Xcode”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/developertools/xcode.html when I wanted to run a diff. Xcode is about a 1GB install, so I didn’t feel like doing that. Cornerstone has a fantastic diff timeline, where you can select any two points and immediately view it within the same window. As a great bonus it doesn’t only do code, but also graphics. Perhaps Versions do this as well, but in Cornerstone I easily just stumbled across it.

~What’s a diff then? It’s checking a file for differences between two points in time. So you don’t need backups for every little change you make. (But hey, backups are still a good thing!)~

Others have discovered these two new clients, so check out “Jade Ohlhauser’s post”:http://jadeohlhauser.com/2008/c_vs_v/ for a more technical review of the two. I also realize that some will say that svn is the old way of doing it, and that something called Git is the new and improved way, however that means back to the command-line, and my point here is that with a nice drag-n-drop friendly interface anyone can use “revision control”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control.