For the previous two feature releases, Kaleidoscope gained the ability to talk to git for the Git File History and the Merge Context Shelf. For this release, we wanted to take some time to refine and improve those features and add smaller bits, with the goal to increase your productivity and make Kaleidoscope more fun.
With the first major update to Kaleidoscope 4, we are entering completely new territory: Kaleidoscope can now directly talk to Git. While Kaleidoscope could always integrate with Git, until now it could only show the results of a Git operation, such as git difftool and git mergetool, which was typically initiated through a Git client like Tower. For the 4.1 update, we decided to focus on the ability to display and compare multiple revisions of a file.
Kaleidoscope 4 comes with an entirely new companion app called Kaleidoscope Prism. By default, it launches along with Kaleidoscope and remains running, so you may have noticed a new icon sitting quietly in your menu bar. Kaleidoscope Prism can change the way you work, with new options for starting and adding to comparisons, even if Kaleidoscope isn’t currently open.
Quite a few users over the years have told us they need to be able to add new text into comparisons. Kaleidoscope 4 adds that ability by allowing you to convert any comparison into a merge that can be edited.
Text filters reduce visual noise in a text comparison, noise that distracts from the differences you do care about. They are useful in a lot of scenarios, in particular when dealing with generated text like logs or files that contain “random” data, like timestamps or identifiers.
After months of hard work, we are very proud to release Kaleidoscope 4 to the world! We are so much looking forward to people using it. We have been running various iterations of the new version for a long time now, and we are very happy how it turned out. We sure hope you will be, too!
Very soon, we will be announcing Kaleidoscope 4 with many exciting new features. But before we share details about the new version, we want to make it clear how the subscription pricing will affect our existing customers.
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!
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.
We’ve just released Kaleidoscope 3.4, the latest version of our powerful comparison app. The new version includes a feature requested by many users: printing! Why would you want to print your code comparisons? Here are a few ways that printing can help you in your work and collaborations.