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…

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.

With a philosophy like that, this product may indeed be one we can look forward to…

[via TUAW]

Note:  According to AppleLinks, Apple is putting some effort into improving Subversion integration in Mac OS X, with a dedicated session at the recent Worldwide Developers Conference:

At the “Xcode and Subversion” lab (session 3000), members of Apple’s Xcode team and key CollabNet employees who are leading contributors to the Subversion open source project will provide insight and hands-on assistance to developers who want to use the new Subversion client for Mac OS X for source code management.

So perhaps we can look forward to better Subversion support in Leopard when October comes around.