Nearly a year after the initial hype, Mac Subversion client Versions has finally seen the light of day with the release of a beta that at first glance offers little that other clients don’t.
The opening line of the beta announcement sheepishly concedes the app’s impending vaporware contender status:
Versions one year anniversary – celebrating with an actual app!
While the interface is certainly slick, it remains to be seen whether a Mac-like look and feel and a bit of Beanstalk integration are enough to win over those who’ve made do with the various alternatives thus far.
Despite the variety of cross-platform and Mac-specific Subversion clients available, with the exception of the somewhat orphaned SCPlugin, each oddly seems to assume developers need yet another app running alongside their work just to interact with a version control system, instead of just blending into the woodwork like the venerable TortoiseSVN.
Sometimes beauty in UI design is less about lickability than invisibility…
The interface artists at Sofa are working on a new Mac OS X Subversion client called Versions, which is due out for public beta release “any moment.”
While there are a few Subversion clients for Mac like svnX and cross-platform GUI front-ends such as RapidSVN and SmartSVN, even the names seem to suggest that none really manage to deliver the ease of use Mac users have come to expect.
No, it’s not all about eye candy—anyone that uses Subversion is typically smart enough to figure it out anyway—but even hard-core programmers benefit from good interaction design, efficiency and a solid user experience. And hey, if more programming tools had decent interfaces, maybe the applications they are used to create would be a bit more pleasant as well…
Or, as the people on the Sofa say:
To create good software, development teams should spend at least half their time thinking about what and how they want to communicate. Preferably even more. We want to create good software and collaborate with others to help make end-user experience a central focus in their development efforts.
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