I’ve been a long time user of Subversion and even though I am starting to switch over to Git I still use Subversion alot, recently (July 08) Tigris have come up with an update of SCPlugin which is a Mac Finder Plug-in for Subversion. (it works a bit like TortoiseSVN on Windows.)
SCPlugin has always looked like a good option, especially when you look at the other options available for Mac OS X, I tend to work with XCode, Subclise or Subversive in Eclipse or just get busy with the command line. The problem is (sorry was!) SCPlugin didn’t work so well…
The other (more popular?) options are SvnX (which, for some reason, makes me gag like I’m eating a towel.) and… er… Well, Versions which is in beta which (sorry) looks like SvnX with lipstick (very, very nice lipstick!), you will also have to pay for it, although the price has not yet been decided.
While I’m at it, I will just say that Versions is not worthwhile for me since the price point has yet to be published, and so it’s little more than a curio. I’m sure that issue will be addressed soon, however bearing in mind that there are several decent solutions which are open-source it would have to be something pretty outstanding. I must admit being a little disappointed in the feature set when I gave it a look. (Use any diff tool!!! … er… because we didn’t bother making a kick-ass diff tool … er …because the one in the XCode suite is awesome .. er… sorry!)
Huh, it turns out I think Versions is a product with no market… hopefully I’ll be wrong about that. I like Pico and Sofa (the outfits behind Versions) and the styling on the Versions website is very nice… (sorry, I’m going to trail off here… I just really wish they hadn’t put… Best Tool Available! on the homepage. That’s asking for trouble.)
Did I mention that SvnX is open-source, and so are all the other tools I’ve mentioned, except Versions
Let me get back to SCPlugin the cool thing about this subversion interface is it’s integration with the Mac Finder, if you’ve used TortoiseSVN (or TortoiseCVS) on windows you’ll know the deal, and if you’re reading this sort of article, frankly, I’d be surprised if you haven’t.
The old problem with SCPlugin was working with a password protected repository, you couldn’t checkout the working copy with SCPlugin, and that was just a bit lame, lame enough for me to not use it.
But that’s all changed now, with this latest release (from July 2008) authentication has been enabled and several other bugs have been squished, it looks good, works properly and has shaken off it’s lame, not working image (at least in my mind.) If you’ve downloaded it before and still have that Subversion entry on your Finder context menu, reminding you it used to be a bit shit, go on and give it another chance, it works now, and it’s sorry for all the pain it caused you. Here’s the link again… SCPlugin … it’s certainly worth the asking price of… nothing.
September 22nd, 2008
When you first get started with FDT3 from PowerFlasher http://fdt.powerflasher.com / http://fdt.powerflasher.de you will probably get the message…
Not enough memory to run FDT – add the following line to your eclipse.ini
-Xmx512m
On a windows machine the eclipse.ini is easy to find, and should be in the same folder as eclipse.exe, editing the file in notepad and altering the line
-Xmx256m
to the value above, should be straightforward. If you struggle with opening and saving files in notepad, sadly this blog post isn’t going to give you the file editing 101 that you sorely need.
If you are cool with the file change, restarting Eclipse and opening the FDT perspective will solve the issue.
On a Mac OS X machine things are a tiny bit trickier, the eclipse.ini file is tucked away inside the Eclipse application package, which you probably have stored in your Applications folder.
The quickest way to get at the eclipse.ini file is to Ctrl + Click the Eclipse application and select the *Show Package Contents* option from the menu.
If you then navigate to Contents/MacOS/ inside the package you’ll see eclipse.ini edit it with TextEdit or whatever you like to use to edit text files (TextMate http://macromates.com/, Eclipse, BBEdit?) and change the line
-Xmx256m
to read
-Xmx512m
Save eclipse.ini and close the finder window, restart Eclipse and you should be good to go.
This information is probably in the FDT forum, but I just figured this out five minutes ago and decided to post here instead.
March 3rd, 2008
I’ve released a new theme for Trac.
I like to encourage people to use Trac. If you create any kind of software it’s a fantastic tool for managing it’s build and maintenance. It also does a pretty good job of managing non-software projects too. If you haven’t used Trac or heard of it before I’d recommend you check it out.
Retrospectiva, is a new Ruby on Rails alternative to Trac, but currently it doesn’t measure up, specifically in terms of community support and plugins. Worth keeping an eye on it though.
June 12th, 2007
Powerflasher FDT 1.5.1 for Eclipse 3.2 is now available...
From the Powerflasher site:
Thanks to everybody for the patience. The new Powerflasher FDT 1.5 version is available from now on. It is a free minor update for all FDT fans. We hope the development time for version 2.0 with AS3 support feels short with it.
New Features:
- Eclipse 3.2 support
- MAC help update improved
- Better UTF-8 Support
- New: Project- and workspace wide reference search
- New: Mark occurrence in the editor area
- New: External SWF Viewer (ESV) with ANT support (windows only for the first step)
- New: classpath editor (imports projectclasspaths to the Flash IDE)
Also new for everyone who was not involved in the public beta:
- New: fdt.flashCompile ANT new option failonerror="true/false"
- New: FSCommand2 added to TopLevel.as
- New: Help Panel rework, also works on mac now
- New: Quickfixes for foreign types
- New: Function Variable QF to create a method
- New: Console LineTracker for MTASC Problems(enables ProblemHover)
- New: Quick-View: Type Dependency (Ctrl-U)
- New: Texthovers and Declarations in Comments and Strings
- New: Editor "Mark Occurences"
- New: "Set Returntype" Quickfix with type-detection
- New: Search References
- New: Show variable-initializer in JavaDoc e.g. var a : String = "Hallo";
- New: TextEdit - Folding actions
- New: Other Perspectives from Flash Perspective available
- New: File associaton of AS-Files via Content Types ("ActionScript Source File")
- New: Ant-View available from Flash Perspective
- New: Parser Performance optimizations
- New: Folding of multiple singleline comments
- New: Autoclosing of blockcomments optional
- New: ANT Task "fdt.browse" opens external browser
- New: Editor Links to AS-Language Elements
- New: TODO Marker "//!"
- And of course bugfixes and small other improved things
IMPORTANT: FDT from now on needs Eclipse >= 3.1 and so is not running on 3.0.x any more!
The update is quite easy:
Launch Eclipse, Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install and select "Search for new features to install". Then mark the checkbox with the Powerflasher FDT site and its done.
We´ve made every update in the last months on the test URL for public beta test. If you participated on it, you already know some of the new features but especially the classpatheditor and the external SWF viewer will be new for all of you. So we hope that we were able to clean out all major bugs in this period but to be realistic, there might be still some. (Why does the bloggers need to be so fast)
Please, post things you find in the bugforum http://www.powerflasher.com/fdt/forum/viewforum.php?f=12 The team will try to fix it quickly.
We hope you will really enjoy it and love the new release as we do. It is still more pure coding comfort.
The Powerflasher Team
October 31st, 2006
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