Show HN: Revisions – version control for dropbox (mac app)
revisionsapp.com
revisionsapp.com
The idea is not to compete with formal version control systems (such as git), but rather to provide a nice interface to the "events" and "previous versions" functionality of dropbox. This allows users to track changes to files (including viewing diffs of changes) and easily restore an entire directory if desired. Might even be useful for serious hackers when collaborating on files with friends/relatives who don't use git... :)
(As always, don't put your most precious secrets in dropbox. Or if you must, encrypt them before you do.)
Suggestions:
- A filter to ignore certain files within a subfolder (regex or strict selection would be fine)
- Express time in relative as well as absolute terms (ie, "five minutes ago," "two days ago," etc.)
- For premium: A built-in diff viewer for those of us who haven't paid for Kalidescope, etc. Maybe you could integrate Mergely (mergely.com)?
The only other thing: I hate the App Store and I'm not alone. It'd be great if you integrated the premium payment option with the direct-download version and added it to the (Home)brew cask repos.
Good work.
Yes, will definitely need to do a better job explaining how grouping works (and perhaps also fine-tune how it actually does work). Currently the time setting (e.g. the default 10 minutes) is the time threshold between successive edits for grouping edits together. Note that this only affects grouping while the table is loading, it does not update existing groups. The "Group" button groups the whole selection together, while the "Ungroup" button shatters the whole selection into individual atomic edits. It's a bit complicated and could definitely need some work still, but I feel something similar to this is needed to provide an easy default overview of edits but also allow users to fine-tune to view the exact diffs that they wish to see. Any further suggestions here would be more than welcome.
Ignoring certain filenames based on regexp is coming soon, probably already in 1.2.1, within a week or two. (This has been suggested by several users.)
With regards to diff viewers: I'm trying to offload diffs to existing software. Currently, all the supported diff viewers cost money, so am definitely looking into connecting with existing free apps as soon as possible. There is at least Apple's FileMerge (though it is cumbersome to obtain since it only comes as part of Xcode), other suggestions are welcome! I'll look into integrating Mergely as well.
Finally, will definitely be adding the ability to purchase the premium version outside of the Mac App Store. I'm not a big fan of the store myself. (I'm trying to combat some of the existing problems of the store by having separate web download versions that can read the App Store receipt. This helps for instance if the user would like to install the latest update without waiting for App Store review to go through.) Will need to look into (Home)brew as well.
- Ignoring certain files and folders based on regular expression match (note: premium-only feature)
- Ability to launch any diff app (including Apple FileMerge), by calling a custom AppleScript script (this also gets around the restrictions imposed by the app sandbox). Sample script for FileMerge provided.
Correcting my earlier post, actually TextWrangler (one of the natively supported diff apps) is free of charge, and now with the custom diff script users can connect to other free diff apps as well (such as FileMerge).
Will soon be adding the possibility to purchase Premium functionality outside the Mac App Store, probably within a week or so.