What’s new in the macOS Monterey command line

  • Florian 
  • 6 min read

The other day we found a helpful command line tool option, only to discover later that the option was only available in macOS Monterey. Since we also need to target Big Sur, this would not be an option for us. So we created something to help us overcome similar issues in the future: a way to compare man pages between macOS system versions. And that’s what we want to share with you today. The Original Problem When testing Kaleidoscope 3 on the first release candidate of macOS Monterey, we noticed an alert that we hadn’t seen before: “Kaleidoscope” needs to… Read More »What’s new in the macOS Monterey command line

Acquiring A Product: Our Kaleidoscope Journey

  • catlan 
  • 7 min read

At the end of 2020, we acquired the app Kaleidoscope. As longtime Mac developers, we were already fans of this powerful tool that makes it easy to spot and merge changes in many different kinds of files, and we were confident we could bring it back to its former glory. In this post, we want to highlight the challenges we faced along the way and share our vision for Kaleidoscope’s future. Deciding on a Product We wanted to build our product portfolio, but rather than building from scratch, we hoped to acquire an existing product. When considering which app to… Read More »Acquiring A Product: Our Kaleidoscope Journey

Meet the new Kaleidoscope

  • catlan 
  • 4 min read

For the past year, we’ve been working hard on modernizing Kaleidoscope, and today we’re proud to release Version 3! Kaleidoscope 3 is a milestone for the app. We have listened to your feedback and enhanced the app accordingly, with new tools for inspecting version control changesets and more settings for text comparisons. We have also brought a fresh new design specifically tailored for macOS Big Sur and macOS Monterey, including support for the Apple M1 chip. Our goal was to modernize this longtime favorite essential app. We’re very excited about the results, and we can’t wait to hear what you… Read More »Meet the new Kaleidoscope

Integrating Alfred and Kaleidoscope

  • Florian 
  • 10 min read

As a long-time Mac user, I’ve seen lots of productivity tools come and go, and I’ve used a fair amount of them through the years. Who still remembers Quicksilver (β)? It was pretty awesome at the time… Other notable mentions for me personally are Butler by my dear pal Peter Maurer and LaunchBar. There are also still new kids on the block, like RayCast.

However, the one I keep coming back to and that is running 24/7 on my Mac is Alfred. I particularly like its combination of easy discoverability of the more mainstream features and the sheer power it hides by default, but offers when you need it.

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Not Just for Code Reviews: Using File Comparison in Legal Workflows

  • Natalye 
  • 6 min read

In the world of software development, file comparison is ubiquitous, as developers need to do line comparisons of code and text every day. But document comparison isn’t limited to the tech world; plenty of other jobs have workflows that require comparing changes across files of all kinds. In fact, it’s difficult to think of a job where file comparison software has no use, especially when you consider how versatile it is.

Before home computers and software programs streamlined this process, comparison consisted of printing out two versions of a document and reviewing them line by line to determine where things were added, changed, or deleted. But the main problem with manual comparison is that it’s both time consuming and prone to human error. 

Read More »Not Just for Code Reviews: Using File Comparison in Legal Workflows

Kaleidoscope 2.4.1

  • Florian 
  • 3 min read

In addition to smaller fixes, there are two changes particularly worth noting in our latest release, Kaleidoscope 2.4.1: New tricks in kspo In case you missed how Kaleidoscope and its new Xcode lldb integration can help improve your debugging workflow, read our previous article Xcode Debugger Integration. In some follow-up support cases to the last release, we came to realize that we could do better and make sending images to Kaleidoscope easier. As it turned out, some AppKit/UIKit classes are notoriously hard to convert into the right destination format. Under the hood, the runtime sometimes uses optimized structures. In Kaleidoscope… Read More »Kaleidoscope 2.4.1

Xcode Debugger Integration

  • Florian 
  • 8 min read

Sometimes things take a while, from initial idea to a full-blown feature usable by everyone… It was October 2018 when Christopher had the idea to integrate Kaleidoscope with lldb, the Xcode Debugger. Back then, he tweeted a gist that showed how to get this to work for his needs. He needed a way to compare the fidelity of his own RTF parser with what macOS/iOS does. The system parser had a serious bug, plus Christopher wanted two extra features while being fully compatible with the operating system. Except for that bug, of course. Constantly comparing the two generated NSAttributedString objects… Read More »Xcode Debugger Integration

Meet the new team

  • catlan 
  • 6 min read

In case you have been wondering who is behind Kaleidoscope, read on! My name is Christopher Atlan, and I founded Letter Opener GmbH back in 2006. Since then, I’ve been the lead developer behind Letter Opener as well as chief customer support counsel. This is what it says on the About page of the Letter Opener site. Thought process Until recently, Letter Opener has been my main and only product. It is a great product, one that allowed me to make a living for 14 years, explore new platforms, new technologies and continuously learn about how to craft and shape… Read More »Meet the new team