Kaleidoscope - File comparison for Mac released

Absolutely beautiful UI, icon and website… but it doesn't do merge resolution. This is practically all I use opendiff (Filemerge) for, so it's useless for me. Add it, and my €29 are yours in a heartbeat — I tend to do lots of merges, and I find this is one of the very few cases where a proper desktop app can make the job so much easier than a command-line tool like vimdiff/emacs. And let's face it, Filemerge is pretty horrid… having to quit the entire app to move onto the next conflict and watch as it spews SIMBL errors over your terminal is hardly ideal.

It is amazing how well-designed Mac apps are in general — it's a shame the trend doesn't really seem to have translated quite as well to the iPhone. Don't get me wrong, some iPhone apps are amazingly well-designed — I guess it's probably down to most Mac apps (at least the ones I use) being produced by indie software houses that really care about experience, whereas most apps on Windows et al are generally developed by large corporations that don't care as much about their apps' aesthetic, and on the iPhone it's those big companies employing outside contractors that are never going to care as much.

Also, that may well be the longest sentence ever penned.

And it even comes with a command-line tool...amazing.

I really like seeing developers put in this kind of effort. Maybe Apple will choose to package it with a future version of Xcode. :)

It's not a shake effect, but a scroll effect (jQ scroll-to plug-in). The appearance of shake occurs because the scroll rate is higher than your browser can render smoothly.

The site uses a paginated, single-page model with sections styled with significant design differences for each "page". When clicking a link (they're not actually links [boooo!]), a JS scroll event is triggered. Some relatively straight-forward tweaks could fix this.

The author uses span tags to wrap elements that act like links. A far more appropriate markup would use an anchor tag with a fragment identifier (#fragment-id). The span tags that are currently in use use class names to identify the "location" of the target. This is, again, poor form. A URL is the tool for specifying location, and URLs are linked using the anchor tag.

HTML Excerpt 1:

Text Scope

Compare text and source code.

Change to:

Text Scope

Compare text and source code.

JS Excerpt 1:

$(".scroll_to_text").click(function() {$.scrollTo($("#text").position().top-40, 300)});

Change to:

$("#text").click(function(event) {$.scrollTo($("body").position().top, 300);event.preventDefault();});

I'm a novice HTML/Javascript guy at best, so the code above may not function correctly in production, but I'm certain that the principle is appropriate.

If you're using a Webkit browser, notice the app icon over time.

They use these images for that effect in CSS:

http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/static/img/ks_color.png , http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/static/img/ks_shading.png , http://www.kaleidoscopeapp.com/static/img/ks_mask.png

Lack of merge support is a deal-breaker for me. I was so hopeful because that's the #1 most requested feature in their other app, Versions.