Cornerstone’s user interface was completely redesigned (and in many places completely reimplemented) with the intention of

The removal of color from the user interface played a significant role in meeting these goals. Color is now exclusively reserved for the indication of status, both for user interface elements, where blue is used consistently to include that something is on/selected, and for the version control status of user content (e.g. file status, text differences).

A subtle, but nonetheless significant improvement in usability was achieved through the consistent use of larger typefaces and images. All lists utilize larger typefaces for markedly improved readability. Additionally, numerous icons and indicators were simplified and increased in size to improve their descriptiveness and recognizability.

The removal of unnecessary adornment and affordances (i.e. clutter) was also a focus. The intention here was two-fold: a) remove visual distractions, and b) maximize available screen real estate to improve usability on small screens. One example of such an improvement was the removal of the status bar at the bottom of the main window, but more subtle changes include

Improving the visual integration of the app with OS X was primarily achieved through the adoption of standard system components as replacements for our own code. Obvious examples include the adoption of standard popovers, the dock badge and the use of Notification Center as a replacement for Growl. More subtle refinements include the adjustment of padding and margins around controls in all windows to be consistent with Apple’s guidelines and the removal of header/footer boxes from all modal windows.

Cornerstone’s source list was completely reimplemented to integrate the functionality of the working copy and repository lists from previous versions. The result is a simpler, more streamlined appearance and significantly improved user experience.

The Inspector was completely reimplemented with the following improvements:

App Sandbox is an Apple security technology present in both OS X and iOS that restricts an app’s capabilities to a pre-defined scope to limit the damage that the app can inflict should it fall victim to attack by malware. It also prevents other sandboxed apps from accessing that app’s data.

Since June 2012 Apple has required that all new major app versions submitted to the Mac App Store implement sandboxing, regardless of whether these apps were already present in the store at the time of the policy change. Cornerstone 3 implements sandboxing in order that we can continue to offer Cornerstone to Mac App Store customers.

The implementation of sandboxing in Cornerstone was extremely challenging. While many other developers have either given up or taken the opportunity to remove their apps from the Mac App Store citing the difficulty of implementing sandboxing, we have invested heavily into re-engineering significant parts of Cornerstone to not just work within the confines of sandboxing, but to embrace it.

In most cases these changes have little or no impact on the app’s functionality or the user’s workflow. However some changes were necessary to accommodate or workaround restrictions imposed by sandboxing. Most notably:

The only way that a user can express to OS X that an app should be allowed to access a file (or folder) is by selecting that file through the standard open/save panel. As a result, the user interface for file selection had to be changed for the check out, import and export commands.

Please note that the private Subversion and SSH configurations used by Cornerstone are not designed to be edited directly by the user. If you need to modify your Subversion or SSH configurations then you should switch Cornerstone to use your shared user configuration.

Sandboxing also restricts the ways in which apps can interact so the way in which Cornerstone integrates with compare tools and scripts had to change, specifically:

Finally, the direct and Mac App Store versions of Cornerstone are no longer able to share a configuration. More technically, the sandbox used by the two versions of the app cannot be shared because the two apps have different digital identities (because they are signed by different entities, i.e. Zennaware and Apple respectively). This separation is enforced through the use of different app IDs for the two versions of Cornerstone. As a result, customers that purchase Cornerstone 3 through the Mac App Store will find that the configuration they used during their trial period with the direct version has been lost.

We recognize that this is not optimal but are unable to work around the technical limitations of Apple’s sandbox implementation to provide a better experience.

Learn more about App Sandbox.

Cornerstone now uses OS X’s Notification Center instead of Growl to notify the user about the completion of lengthy activities such as commits, check outs, exports, imports and updates.

Cornerstone’s preference window includes a new Notifications pane that allows the user to specify which activities are shown in Notification Center as alerts. Notifications are disabled for all activities by default.

Cornerstone also now displays the number of uncommitted working copy changes in the dock as a standard badge. The visibility of this badge is now controlled by the Notification Center pane in System Preferences.

Several improvements where made to the externals editor:

Note that Cornerstone 3 will write externals in svn 1.5 format whenever peg revisions are used. If you require compatibility with svn 1.4 then we recommend that you a) expand the revision fields and then enter an operative revision into the upper field, or b) edit the property’s raw text in the text view.

A number of new features were added to the transcript, including:

Rename and move operations result in a pair of modifications in a working copy: a copied item is added and the original item is deleted. Previous versions of Cornerstone allowed these items to be committed independently, but Cornerstone 3 includes improvements to ensure that these changes are always committed together:

Please note that these improvements are only available for 1.8-format working copies.

The new Download command was added to the Repository Browser’s right-click menu. This provides a simple one-click command for exporting the selected file or folder to the user’s Downloads folder.

Individual files can now be excluded from a sparse working copy (previously only folders could be excluded).

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Secure Shell (SSH) options previously located in the Certificatesand Advanced preferences panes were consolidated into the new Security pane.

The repository context menu in the source list contains a new Caching… command that allows a user to inspect and change the log caching settings for the repository.

Log view items older than the revision of the selected item now have a revert button. Clicking on this button will revert the selected item to that revision.

A syntax-coloring grammar was added for the Swift programming language.

Several operations that previously had their own custom panel (e.g. check out, import, export) were streamlined to use the standard OS X open/save panel. The user interfaces for these operations are now consistent with those of the Save Patch and Add Working Copy commands that were already based on open/save panels.

Include Externals in Updates option was moved from the Working Copy menu to the Working Copysection of the Inspector, where the option is now named Update contents of externals for consistency with the related option in the Update window.

This not only makes the option more discoverable, it also allows the exact effect of the setting to be described in a tooltip.

Much effort was invested into improving how Cornerstone handles working copies and file-based repositories that are inaccessible to the application (i.e. no longer exist or can’t be accessed due to missing permissions).

Wherever possible, Cornerstone provides recovery options such as allowing the user to a) select an alternate location for missing folders, or b) grant the application access to an inaccessible folder by locating the folder using a standard open panel.

Previous versions of Cornerstone defaulted to 10pt Monaco. Cornerstone 3 now defaults to the user’s preferred fixed-pitch font (normally Menlo Regular). This behavior is more consistent with other Mac applications such as Xcode. This change has no effect if the user has selected another font in the application’s preferences.

The log view will now use the fixed-pitch font defined in the application’s preferences (previous versions always used 10pt Monaco). The Use font smoothing preference is also respected.

The glyphs used to represent invisible characters (spaces, left tabs, right tabs, newlines and page breaks) were changed to be more consistent with popular OS X text editors such as BBEdit, TextWrangler and TextMate.

Most noticibly, the not sign (¬ U+00AC) is now used instead of the pilcrow sign (¶ U+00B6) to represent carriage returns and line feeds, resulting in improved readability when invisibles are displayed. The pilcrow sign is now used to represent page breaks.

The appearance of the window shown by the Upgrade Working Copy… command was improved. In addition, the wording of the associated compatibility warning was improved and a button was added linking to a FAQ article providing additional information on inter-application compatibility.

In previous versions of Cornerstone, the working copy browser used small arrow icons in the Folder Status column to indicate folders that contained uncommitted changes.

This status is now indicated by a small dot that is only shown for collapsed folders in order to reduce visual clutter.

The title of the column (as shown by the tooltip and in the column menu) was changed from Folder Status to Contains changes to prevent the possible interpretation that the icon displays the folder’s version control status.

A tooltip is also now displayed for this column.

Cornerstone will now prompt to upgrade working copies whose format is not supported.

Retina versions were added for all images used in the help documentation (Help > Cornerstone Help).

The export function now supports exporting the previous revision for working copy items.

Cornerstone’s SSH handling was improved. Specifically, Cornerstone now enables improved parallelism for concurrent SSH requests. This is most noticeable in the repository browser when performing operations simultaneously on multiple files/folders via a low-latency network connection.

Significant effort was invested into improving the scrolling performance of the working copy and repository browsers as well as the transcript view. Text comparison scrolling performance was also significantly improved.

In addition, the image comparison view was completely reimplemented to improve responsiveness, both when scrolling and switching between magnification.

The activity indicators displayed in the source list caused significant CPU utilization in previous versions. These indicators were completely reimplemented for Cornerstone 3 to be as efficient as possible and now have a negligable impact on CPU utilization.

Cornerstone 3 launches significantly faster than previous versions. This is due to the removal of 32-bit code and the adoption of improvements in Apple’s developer tool chain that reduce the overhead of code signing verification.

Previous versions of Cornerstone only supported SSH server fingerprints hashed using MD5. Cornerstone 3 adds support for 256-, 384- and 512-bit SHA–2 hashes (i.e. SHA–256, SHA–384 and SHA–512).

Support for Subversion 1.6 was removed in Cornerstone 3. See the Compatibility section below for more information.

The Open in Terminal command in the File menu previously used AppleScript to open a new tab in the Terminal application. Use of AppleScript in this manner is not compatible with Apple’s app sandbox and an alternative was implemented which provides similar functionality but always opens a new Terminal window.

Previous versions of Cornerstone would bounce once in the dock if an activity completed when the application was inactive. This behavior was controlled by a preference in the General preference pane (Bounce in dock when an operation completes).

Cornerstone’s support for Notification Center obviates the need for dock bounce notifications. If you would like to be notified when an activity completes then enable the corresponding event in the Notifications preference pane.

Previous versions of Cornerstone included import options that allowed a folder to be imported and replaced with a working copy as part of the import operation. While potentially useful, these options significantly increased the complexity of the import user interface and were removed.

Get Info, Switch… and Export… were removed from the context menu in the working copy browser.

Get Info was no longer applicable as the option to display the Inspector in a separate window was removed (this command was intended to approximate the behavior in Finder). Get Info was also removed from the repository browser context menu.

Switch… and Export… are uncommonly-used commands and were removed to reduce the size of the menu. Switch… is still available on the source list’s working copy context menu (where it is arguably more useful as it makes more sense to switch a working copy’s root folder).

Previous versions of Cornerstone included an option to open the working copy in Finder when the check out operation completed (When Complete: Open in Finder). This option was removed in the interest of reduced user interface complexity.

See the above section on sandboxing for more information.

None of the versions of Subversion supported by Cornerstone 3 support the downgrading of working copies to an older format. The Downgrade Working Copy function was therefore removed from the Working Copy menu.

Previous versions of Cornerstone displayed a padlock in the top right corner if the selected working copy or repository used a secure connection type.

In actual fact Cornerstone is not able to reliably determine whether a connection type is secure so the indicator was removed (specifically, it is not possible to determine the degree of security provided by tunnels used with the svn protocol).

Cornerstone 3 is compatible with OS X 10.11 El Capitan and newer.

The adoption of sandboxing means that it is not possible to migrate all the user’s data from previous versions of Cornerstone. The best that we could do was import a potentially confusing subset, with the user left to clean up the resultant mess.

After careful consideration we decided that it would be best for Cornerstone not to attempt a migration of any sort, instead launching the new version with a clean, default configuration.

Cornerstone 3 can co-exist with previous versions. No preferences or configuration data are shared between the versions.

Subversion 1.6 support was removed. Cornerstone 3 will prompt to upgrade 1.6-format working copies when they are added.

Cornerstone 3 continues to support Subversion 1.7 and 1.8. The included versions were updated to 1.7.22 and 1.8.15.