Over the past many years I lead software development teams that produced commercial-ready software. In order to track revisions we always used source control tools like MKS, Git, and SVN. Without it, chaos would erupt when a prior version couldn’t be rebuilt for testing or customer support.
Versioning has served as a “safe haven” historical record of all of the intellectual property associated with software builds. (Not to mention that version control was typically mandated in customer agreements.)
For software developers, using these tools to manage software source code and other artifacts took some learning once you memorized the commands:
Not exactly intuitive!
Although we had an idea of what the perfect versioning app would need to do, Ken Whitaker decided to write a fifth book called Version Control for Creative Professionals that attempted to simplify how non-programmers could use Git (a very popular shareware versioning tool):
After writing and illustrating over 50 pages Ken simply stopped. Attempting to simplify the complexity of Git was plain difficult. Great for software engineers, not so great for creative professionals. Rather than design outward with a host of features hoping customers would like it, the opposite approach was taken.
Spresso iVersionIt was designed based on how a customer, a non-sophisticated one at that, would want version control to work. The app's design goals are simple:
So, that's dandy. What's the catch? There’s only one. It is the customer's responsibility to make sure that all of a project's assets (files, directories, ...) reside under one project folder. That’s it. (By the way, Git and SVN require the same thing.)
Being a programmer, the app was originally designed in late 2012 while on an extended trip back in Asheville, North Carolina. The initial working edition was completed in Seattle, Washington.
So why hasn’t it been released? Ken has been doing testing, testing, and even more testing while using it on his own Upwork and personal projects. (A versioning app that safeguards your digital stuff must be completely reliable.)
No subscriptions, no upgrade fees, and you can install Spresso iVersionIt on as many PCs (or Macs) that you personally use*. Oh yeah, almost forgot—you can use the Decaf edition free forever. Learn more about our no-nonsense licensing.
* Separate Spresso iVersionIt licenses are required for macOS and Windows
In a recent role as editor of Better Software magazine, Ken used the pre-release Spresso iVersionIt since 2014 to keep track of changes for each article and all of its supporting files (at least four milestones for each article).
CONTACT KEN ABOUT
SPRESSO IVERSIONIT
1201-1440
In a recent role as editor of Better Software magazine, Ken used the pre-release Spresso iVersionIt since 2014 to keep track of changes for each article and all of its supporting files (at least four milestones for each article).
1025-1200