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Code Review of Feature Branches

  • catlan 
  • 4 min read

A common workflow in Git is to use feature branches, where work is focused on one specific task. The Changeset functionality in Kaleidoscope helps you see exactly what has been done in a feature branch.

Compare binary data using Kaleidoscope

  • Florian 

There are a number of valid reasons why you might want to compare files as binary data. As a developer, you may want to check aspects of an executable down to the bit-level detail. Also, files that look identical in Kaleidoscope might not be identical on disk. That’s where the fun starts…

The Open in Kaleidoscope Service

  • Florian 

The Services menu, originally part of NeXTSTEP, was introduced to the Mac with the advent of OS X in 2001. Services never received a lot of love or major updates. Luckily, they continue to work to this day and can be remarkably helpful. We’ll show you how you can benefit from Services, in particular the services that Kaleidoscope provides.

Compare Pages Documents in Kaleidoscope

  • Florian 

With Kaleidoscope 3.8, we’re bringing you a new workflow to compare Pages documents, powered by Shortcuts and AppleScript. As the initial setup is a bit of a challenge, we’re showing you how to do it, step by step.

Our Favorite Tower Features

  • Florian 
  • 4 min read

In this article, we’ll share a few of Tower’s features that our team members love the most. Here’s what the Kaleidoscope engineers told us. If you haven’t seen our article on how Kaleidoscope and Tower make the perfect Git setup, you may want to start with that.

Share your diffs with Kaleidoscope 3.7

  • Florian 

Kaleidoscope 3.7 marks the beginning of a new chapter: you can now share your text diffs with other people. It’s as easy as clicking the common Share button in the toolbar and selecting a service, like Messages or AirDrop. We think you’re going to like it!

Mac App Store and investing engineering time

  • catlan 

Today I’d like to share some insight in what I consider a mistake I made in investing our engineering time. Running a business is hard, and there aren’t always perfect solutions or ideal situations.

Once again, we underestimated the Mac App Store risk factor when making a decision.

Using Custom Keyboard Shortcuts in Kaleidoscope

  • Florian 

When selecting keyboard shortcuts for menu commands, we generally try to follow best practices. Still, our choices won’t please all users. Every so often, we receive feedback asking us to change a shortcut or to provide the ability to customize shortcuts. Some apps for power users provide full customization options for keyboard shortcuts, but for Kaleidoscope we haven’t found this worth the effort so far.

If you want to customize a particular shortcut, there is a solution in plain sight: System Preferences (System Settings on macOS Ventura) provides the ability to set custom keyboard shortcuts for apps. Let’s explore this using a practical example.

Kaleidoscope + Tower: the perfect Git setup

  • Florian 
  • 6 min read
Kaleidoscope + Tower

Developers make up the largest segment of Kaleidoscope customers. Many of you use the Git version control system to manage your source code, regardless of the programming language you may be using. The Kaleidoscope team also uses Git, and today we want to tell you about an app that most of us use on a daily basis.

There’s an obvious synergy between Tower and Kaleidoscope: Tower is a great front end to Git’s change management and Kaleidoscope is a tool for dealing with changes. Here are a few scenarios, beyond comparing two files, that may not be obvious and can help you optimize your workflow.

Comparing Archive Contents with Kaleidoscope

  • Florian 
  • 5 min read

Over the last few months, we’ve received several feature requests for the ability to compare the contents of archives like .zip or .jar. Indeed, an archive is really a folder full of files, a folder that happens to be compressed into a single file. So we should be able to compare archives using Kaleidoscope.

Today we are happy to announce that, as of Kaleidoscope 3.5, comparing archives is possible, via a brand new action for Shortcuts.