Our company has a long history with the Mac App Store. Letter Opener has been available since January 2011, the day the App Store opened. Kaleidoscope was released on the App Store in January 2013, when version 2.0 launched.
Most developers for Apple platforms deal with tests in some way or another. XCTest is probably the most popular framework because it’s built directly into Xcode and can be integrated with build processes and automation.
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.
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.
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.
As mentioned on Twitter, while working with us on some things for a new version of Kaleidoscope, Peter created this beautiful artwork. Immediately, I wanted to use it as a desktop picture (wallpaper) for all of my devices. To this day it’s in constant use on both my iPad and my MacBook Pro.
It’s about time we show you a glimpse of what we’ve been up to in the last few months, besides listening to that great Leonard Cohen album.
As a long-time Mac user, I’ve seen lots of productivity tools come and go. 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.
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.
In addition to smaller fixes, there are two changes particularly worth noting in our latest release, Kaleidoscope 2.4.1: new tricks in kspo, and support for PDF image assets.