After years of having mediocre Subversion clients to choose from, I was glad when Cornerstone and Versions appeared on the scene. These new challengers have the look and feel of stylish Mac applications and presumably have a lot of new users considering the large vacuum created by developers who have tried and discarded the likes of svnX, SmartSVN and ZigVersion only to go back to the command line.1

I still use the Subversion support built into TextMate, but for me that works best when working with individual files and isn’t great for managing several repositories. For the past few months I’ve been using Versions but when the the public beta expired, I took a closer look at Cornerstone. I liked what I saw.

Do you ever skip straight to the end of a product review to see the pros and cons? I know I do. At the end of the day we decided on Cornerstone instead of Versions. They’re both good and I like Versions’ river-of-news timeline view but everything else in Cornerstone seemed better to us, namely:

• file comparison tools are built-in and they’re excellent
• repositories can be searched by filename or Subversion user
• a more intuitive filters for viewing files and directories (Versions is either “All” or “Changed”)
• support more than one issue tracker per repository
• a multi-window interface (which is disabled by default for some reason)
• drag-and-drop that works to and from the Finder (or Path Finder, as it were).
• scripts can be run after a successful commit making it easier to deploy, notify via IM, etc. easier
• support for Subversion 1.4 and 1.5 (instead of 1.4 or 1.5)

It was also cheaper in my case because the Cornerstone license permits two computers per individual and Versions’ license does not.

1. 1. Ironically, now that there are several excellent Subversion clients to choose from, many developers I know have switched away from Subversion and are using Git and GitX.