sourcetree
Four and a half years ago, I decided to write a Mac tool for Gitand Mercurial, which I’d eventually name SourceTree(aside: names are hard, and I was quite pleased with this one). I wasn’t happy with the Mac apps that were out there at the time and thought I could write something that fit my needs better, and by extension the needs of other developers who felt like I did. I’d never written a Mac-specific app before, and I thought it would be fun to learn how.
The SourceTree1.2 launch sale is now over, and I thought I’d post some indicative results. I went for a fairly large discount of 40% over a full week, and some people I know commented to me along the lines of ‘what about all that money you’ll be losing on each sale?’. I decided on a large discount because SourceTree 1.2 was a major update that I was actually quite proud of, so I wanted to get it in front of as many people as I could.
Since I’m trying to spread this news as far and wide as I can, I might as well say it here too 😀 Since the approval light just went green on the Mac App Store, I’m happy to announce the launch of SourceTree1.2! In celebration, I’m having a crazy-bonkers 40% off sale just for one week, so get it while it’s hot! There’s loads of things that are new or improved in this release, but here are the headlines:
As many of you probably know, almost a year ago now I decided to take the plunge and move my primary development activities to the Mac. I taught myself Objective-C, got properly to grips with Cocoa at last, and started a new Mac OS X-specific project which would eventually become SourceTree, learning a ton along the way (a process which is by no means complete!). Happily, things have turned out very well - SourceTree continues to sell, reassuring me that there’s enough interest out there for me to keep expanding and improving it (I’m looking forward to getting the next major release in people’s hands soon), and I’ve also been getting some Mac/Ogre-based contract work which I’ve enjoyed a great deal.
I was thinking the other day about how many version control systems I’ve made my way through over the years of being a professional developer, and I figured it would be fun to put it in graph form. Of course, this is entirely from memory and gives the illusion of being more empirical than it actually is, but hey, everyone loves graphs, right? Yes, I really didn’t use any source control back in 1994, barring backing up to 3.
I don’t blog as much as I used to, for reasons which are somewhat relevant to this post - rather you can usually find fragments of my consciousness floating around the Twittersphereinstead, since its enforced brevity requires considerably less of my time to populate. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I believe that if you’re going to write a blog post about something, you should probably make sure it’s written in a half-decent way, and that’s fairly time consuming, particularly when you’re ever so slightly anal about language as I am.
I’m pleased to announce that I’m finally ready to make my first fully-fledged commercial Mac OS X application available to the world! SourceTree is a user-friendly Mac OS X front-end for Mercurialand Git, the two most popular distributed version control systems used today. The goal was to create a single tool which could deal with both systems efficiently, and to give a developer quick and intuitive access to the things (s)he needs to just get on with building software.