I noticed this blog entry while browsing yesterday, and I have to say it is an amazing example of great customer service.

The reason there’s a ‘Cult of Mac’

Just read it and think of how you would feel if you were the customer, AMAZING.

Many Code Spaces users have asked my which Subversion Clinets are the best for a given platform so I a have compiled this list of Subversion Clients and grouped it by Operating System, I know this list is not complete so let me know if i have missed any really good ones ;-)

• TortioseSVN is the de-facto standard when it comes to Subversion clients, on windows that is, TortoiseSVN is OPEN SOURCE, and FREE and is a complete implementation, featuring visual Diff and Merge and really good integration with the windows shell.

• Rapid SVN is a Cross Platform stand alone client. It sports a Simple interface that is familiar to most source control clients, and is OPEN SOURCE and FREE.

• SmartSVN is a commercial Subversion Client, which includes all the standard SVN features, with some nice additions like a fancy Revision Graph. SmartSVN costs $79.99 per user but for those of you who don’t do Open Source, it’s a good alternative to TortioseSVN and RadipSVN.

• SVN.exe is the command line Subversion client that comes with the standard Subversion install and for 90% of your subversion work is more than good enough to accomplish what you need, It isn’t a GUI and you have to learn all the commands, but once you have you will also have a much better understanding of the Subversion internals. SVN.exe is OPEN SOURCE and FREE.

Mac OS X

• SCPlugin is an open source project that is building a Mac version of TortoiseSVN (see above), and although its far from being complete it does give you the shell integration and the basic SVN commands. it is OPEN SOURCE and FREE.

• RapidSVN (See above) being cross platform is also a good client for Mac OS X, however the look and feel is not really what most Mac users expect. (Java tut).

• SmartSVM (See above) being cross platform is also a good commercial Subversion client on Mac OS X.

• The SVN command line client again is a great utility on the Mac.

Linux

• RapidSVN and SmartSVN also run on Linux systems (java required) and are both great on this platform.

• Svn command line is probably the tool of choice for most Linux developers. Linux users are generally more comfortable in the command line.

In my next post i will highlight some of the IDE’s and IDE Extensions that enable Subversion Integration.

We recently redesigned the Code Spaces website, and a key part of this was the new Logo:

Any of you that know me will be both shocked and amazed to know that I did the Logo myself, but this is not me being cheap and trying to save a few hundred dollars, I actually couldn’t find somebody who:

a. Was able to run with my vague and often contradictory requirements 
b. Was able to give me a quote for less that $1000 dollars (I'm not cheep but come on its only a logo).
c. Was even remotely interested in giving me the time to explain my requirements.

Now I spent a good two weeks discussing and and giving feedback to a range of designers, some looking to charge $50 per logo to some looking to charge $1000.

I didn’t get any what i would call good icons during this stage but i found one interesting thing and that is, out of all the companies trying to charge more than $750 not one of them actually listened to my feedback. In fact the only good responses I got from my feedback was one of the guys looking to charge < $100 although ultimately it wasn’t to be.

As my dear old Granddad used to say “if you want a job doing properly, DO IT YOURSELF!”

Designing your own Icon or any other graphics is a daunting task for a software developer, things like creativity don’t come easy to us, but hey I’m sat in front of an iMAC “the graphics designers tool of choice” so I must be able to come up with something, shouldn’t I?

Well I decided that the best option would be to draw with a pencil on paper some prototype designs. I expected to draw hundreds, and that the creative juices from deep within my soul would rise to the surface to produce an icon of beauty that the whole world would marvel at however, I drew 3, yes three.

All three were basically a blob and the word Code Spaces, which is in fact the correct anatomy for a logo but at this point not too impressive.

Plan b, was to find an image to replace the blob and then draw some sketches based on that, so I browsed along to iStockPhoto and searched for vector illustrations with the key word cogs and identified 3 images that i could use to replace my “blobs” and redrew the designs.

This would be my short list of designs, and here it is for your viewing pleasure, (be gentle and click to enlarge)

You may have already noticed that I finally picked the middle logo to actually create.

I was able to purchase the image that inspired my design from iStockPhoto and using Illustrator was able to stick the work Code Spaces next to it, with a gradient and a drop shadow for good measure and what would your know? I have a logo. Not that great, but not to bad.

Best of all I saved hundreds of dollars and it only cost me 15 hours of my time, no only kidding the icon took only 30 mins after conception and the best thing really is that every time I visit the website I see it looking right back at me, and it gives me nice warm “I Did That” feeling.

So if your in this position, Do It Yourself!

We recently increased the disk space quota for our Free account from 10mb to 50mb which I know a lot of you appreciated.

Well I’m not sure if it is something to do with the time of year or maybe we are just too nice, but we have done it again!

This time we have double the user quota from 1 to 2, so you can have 2 users working on 50mb of Subversion, with Project Management, Issue Tracking, Project Milestones, and all the rest of the Code Spaces goodness ;-)

To get your own free plan, simply sign up here and once your evaluation has expired simply select to upgrade to the FREE plan, no credit cards required, no hassle, just Subversion Hosting heaven.

Today we have increased the disk space limit for our Free accounts from 10mb to 50mb.

Again this is part of our ongoing improvement program but we also found that the 10mb restriction didn’t really allow you to run a project efficiently.

As always we don’t count backups or database data in this restriction its purely Subversion data, so you should have plenty to keep you going.

As part of our ongoing commitment keep improving Code Spaces we have implemented a Real Time Backup system.

No More Daily Backups!

Basically we have replaced the Daily Backup system with a new real time backup that creates a copy of your repository each time you do a Subversion Commit.

You can see or download your subversion backups form the Admin section of Code Spaces.

Let us know what you think?

Code Spaces now allows Subversion Commits to be linked to Work Items, enabling you to create a relationship between a commit and a task, bug, etc…

From the Work Items screen simply open a Work Item and notice the “Linked Subversion Commits” tab:

From here you can click on the Add link to add any number of Commits to the Work Item.

This is a great way of tracking what got fixed, when and why, especially when reviewing a change log or road map from the Project Dashboard.

Please let us know what you think of this or any other Code Spaces features via our Contact Us page.

If you can’t tear yourself away from Visual Studio to do your Subversion Commits you might like this Visual Studio Plugin:

AnkhSVN: A Subversion addin for Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

From the Prject Website:

“AnkhSVN is a Visual Studio .NET addin for the Subversion version control system. It allows you to perform the most common version control operations directly from inside the VS.NET IDE. Not all the functionality provided by SVN is (yet) supported, but the majority of operations that support the daily workflow are implemented.”

AnkhSVN Unlike the MSSCCI plugins that most source control systems use to integrate with Visual Studio is unintrusive, easy to use and doesn’t leave you feeling like your playing russian roulette with your source code (I’m talking about you Visual Source Safe!).

The icons used to display statuses in the solution explorer may seem a little odd at first but all the SVN commands you need are only a context menu away.

The best thing about this method of integration with Visual Studio is that you don’t need to bind the proj file with your repository like you do with VSS, TFS, etc… AmkhSVN simply picks up that your code is in a Subversion Working folder and uses the Subversion sub system to do the push ups – Nice!

If like us you have dozens of repositories in your Code Spaces account you can use this simple tip to get quick access to all your repositories.

Normally you would use a URL similar to this to access a specific repository:

http(s)://svn.codespaces.com/[my_account]/[my_repository]

However, if you simply go up one level to:

http(s)://svn.codespaces.com/[my_account]/

Paste this into your browsers address bar, you will see a list of all your repositories and even better, they are browsable (provided you have permission to them).

By now you will most likely be aware that Subversion knocks the spots off of it’s competitors, however you may not be aware of the wealth of clients that work with Subversion.

TortoiseSVN is by far the most popular Subversion Client, so much so that the TortoiseSVN project on SourceForge boasts 5,113,930 downloads (wow).

Adam Pash has done a great write up over at lifehacker.com which I strongly recommend you read if you want a quick start guide to using TortoiseSVN.

Windows Only!!!

If like me you don’t do the majority of your work on Windows you may look at TortoiseSVN with envy, however all is not lost OSX users can use the SCCPlugin which although incomplete will give you nice icons and easy access to commit, update, etc…

Linux users get the short straw when it comes to Graphical Clients that integrate into the Shell however I think the general consensus is that most Linux users are usually knee deep in a terminal window anyway and are generally more comfortable with the command line interface, however TortoiseSVN for gnome and/or KDE would be very nice .