Cornerstone 1.1 Released

Back in late May this year I downloaded the first beta release of the Versions SVN client from http://versionsapp.com and while impressed with its simple layout, native OS X integration and clean approach to SVN it did seem lacking in feature set. Granted over the subsequent 6 or 7 releases the product has improved further, but I still don’t feel it is suitable for our own internal development teams.

At exactly the same time Cornerstone 1.0 was released by Zennaware. This full featured SVN client provided some nice features for repository browsing, a nice visual separation of repositories and working copies and all the shortcut keys you could ask for (something that bugged me with Syncro SVN and SmartSVN).

After a few weeks of random testing I settled on using Cornerstone as my preferred SVN client on OS X and purchased the product, then at version 1.0.3. Unfortunately there were some issues with the 1.0 release, especially around the speed of repository browsing, checkout/in and refreshing working copies. After a few days I went almost nuts with the constant waiting on large repositories and fired off an email to creator at Zennaware.

To his credit he acknowledged the bugs, provided some work around options for the meantime and asked if I would like to assist in beta testing the 1.1 release.

Over the past 12 weeks or so the 1.1 release has been beta tested and gone through numerous revisions, fixes and improvements resulting in a very polished product and certainly an SVN client I would recommend for developers on Mac OS X.

In another post I will provide a detailed comparison of my thoughts on Cornerstone, Versions, Syncro SVN and SmartSVN the four clients I have worked with through this year.

In the meantime download a trial copy of the Cornerstone 1.1 release from the Zennaware website.