Changes

MartianCraft, developer of Briefs and Typeset, has acquired Texas-based BitBQ LLC to expand its product offerings into consumer software and bolster its existing Pro App line-up. The asset purchase includes BitBQ's signature products: TouchPad, NumPad, QueueUp, and Changes.

Press Release: http://connectedflow.com/changes/ BitBQ LLC today announced the acquisition of the powerful file and folder comparison application Changes from Connected Flow Ltd. "I'm excited to announce the acquisition of Changes", said Patrick Burleson, Owner of BitBQ. "I use Changes everyday in my work and I'm looking forward to improving the app. There are a lot of features I can't wait to add."

Last update in 2009?! This one’s dead, Jim! %-)

I like this app and have used it nearly every day for about a year. It has good integration with various revision control systems allowing you to compare your current files with previous revisions and also plays well with TextMate. The interface in Changes is much more intuitive than Apples' FileMerge. It's been a decent app, although I wish the author would release updates more often.

No "follow symbolic link" option?! Without that, Changes is completely useless to me.

Just spent a hour playing with Changes. Looking at the feature set, this looked to be excatly what I was looking for. I am a Windows convert and I am looking for something to replace the combination of WebDrive and WinMerge on WinXP for inspecting and deploying changes to web apps I write. I am really bummed about Changes because it is so close, but yet so far away from what I need. The built in MacFUSE seemed to work well and connected to my web server, the display of the changed files looks pretty good, but then things started falling apart. I have a large number of log files I need to filter so I tried to set up an exclusion filter. From what I can tell Changes pulls down all the files, then filters them instead of seeing the name is excluded and passing over it. This makes a refresh of the display so slow as to be unusable. Refresh on WinXP - 4.22 sec Changes seems like forever. Tried to time it but Changes flooded my ISP with bad requests and got my IP address blacklisted on the server. Had to contact the ISP to get off the black list (nightmare). I did have it working for about an half an hour and tried to update a file on the server. Never did figure it out. Seems like every time I clicked some thing I got the dreaded Mac spinning beach ball. And I never got any status messages so I was lost on what was happening. After 10 minutes of waiting on Changes I pressed the refresh button and that is when I was blacklisted (see above). At this point I gave up. I really wish Changes had worked out. The only viable solution I have found on the Mac to replace WebDrive - WinMerge is a combination of ExpanDrive and Araxis Merge. Way more $$$ than any other alternative, but at this point the only thing that seems to work. I did try MacFusion 2.0.3 with Araxis Merge to save some money, but MacFusion got me blacklisted also. I did not have this problem with ExpanDrive. I guess this is one of those situations where you get what you pay for. Bummer.

let me suggest the addition of a useful feature. 'open invisible files'. cvs puts his old working copy as invisible file and the option to open it directly from Changes would be a welcome addition. same rating as my previous review as nothing changed (no pun intended) from the last time.

The idea of this app is to serve a need which is currently unserved by FileMerge or Eclipse. Eclipse is good, but is often not considered due to its dependency on Java. It's also pretty tough to use in my opinion. If you have a non-Java workflow, I'm pretty sure you're not going to be interested in Eclipse. FileMerge lacks in place editing and requires a merge output file. Plus, it doesn't attempt to match the lines in the diff blocks, making it more difficult to tell what changed in the text file. As far as vfx, I don't understand why this is a net negative in a development tool. One could make this argument for any application, are developer tools _supposed_ to be ugly and difficult to use?

good first shot for a valuable niche but...it needs more and more features to justify the price as the optimus FileMerge is free with the Apple Dev Tools and you can, like me, use Eclipse only loaded with the CVS, SVN modules (fast loading time and central control over yours repos). Eclispe has a very good diff tool full of option and working with the local history too (apart from the repo). Changes lacks all the bells and whistles from the duo above (integration and tools) and in this incarnation is quite a very barebone diff with the merge addon as a bonus (textwrangler has an efficient but limited diff too. but it is free). It needs more visual rapresentation of conflicts, more info about the files being edited and where they are and so on and less vfx (sorry, a merge tool isn't a delecious generation tool). A more mature CM and an effective syntax coloring are welcome too. Apart from these point i like to have a new native kid on the block cause we need more options. I believe it has all the time to grow in a more mature application as the time goes on and the dev keeps focused on features and not on vfx. keep the good work.