Comments on: The Ultimate Guide to Version Control for Designers

By: HakNick

HakNick — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 03:32:48 +0000

Nice article,
But it would be nice if we could get any info on the capabilities of Version Cue for Adobe binary (psd, etc) files. Does it do any smart diffing and revision-ing or does it just save as new copies. Any extra locking capabilities over svn and git? What about between svn and git

By: Rob Record

Rob Record — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:27:57 +0000

I can’t recommend Cornerstone highly enough as a Mac front end for subversion. I was afraid of SVN at first, now it’s like a dream! I love it :) Very easy to use. Has cleaned up my hard disk a lot.

I used that for coding, and just started with Adobe Version Cue for designing. seed it once before but had problems (lost some work) because I didn’t understand how to use it. Here’s hoping second time is the charm!

Thanks for the great article :)

By: Ramesh V R

Ramesh V R — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 17:06:20 +0000

In my opinion still many of the designers don’t use a version controlling system, though they know it will benefit them.
Let this article make them use it.
Great stuff!

By: Jason Manheim

Jason Manheim — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:01:21 +0000

Anyone know if there’s any good Mac GUI clients in development for Git?

By: Simon Eder

Simon Eder — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 15:31:33 +0000

Thanks for the info, I am surprised buy the lack of content at adobe on the subject.
Version control is very important, we are employing more people and trying to centralize our file systems. We had project files stored on different computers and we all work remotly. We develop websites using businesscatalyst.com as a cms and it has it own version control for pages but templates and applications layouts are stored internally with no rollback. On more than one occasion one of our developers (me too)has written over a template or application file with a different one and the file has to be reconstructed. Version cue is great because it is integrated with creative suite a couple concerns is it is free now but for how long and how wise is it to go with the same supplier for all your workflow solutions. Is lock in going to be an issue. Does anyone have any data on how secure version cue is?

By: Victor

Victor — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 16:08:11 +0000

Very nice article Anatoly, quite a good introduction to the topic.

A couple of things for everyone to keep in mind. First off, if you’re a Mac user, Subversion usage can lead to all sorts of issues with certain applications. In order to track changes and hierarchy, subversion creates hidden folders (named ‘.svn’) in every folder of a working copy on your hard drive. This could be a problem when using certain programs on OS X such as any of the iWorks products and Omnigraffle. The problem is that the “Documents” generated by these programs are not files, but are packaged folders. When you open up the document each program will simply look through the package and remove anything that doesn’t belong there (namely the .svn subfolders). This will drive subversion nuts every time you try to update one of these types of documents. While there are workarounds for this, it makes using Subversion more complex than it needs to be on a Mac with these apps.

This is one of the reasons I personally use Git which puts all of its version control information in a single folder at just inside the working copy’s project folder.

The second thing to think about when choosing a version control system is the availability of good GUI clients. On Windows there’s TortoiseSVN and TortoiseGit which integrate well with Explorer and make using version control as simple as right-clicking on a folder.

On the Mac there are excellent subversion clients (like Versions, ZigVersion and Cornerstone). However, there’s a surprising lack of GUI clients for GIT, Mercurial and Bazaar (another popular distributed system). The available GIT clients for the Mac are either difficult to use or they are incomplete, forcing you to learn the cryptic command line tools to get things done.

The bottom line is to look at your file handling needs and check out which tools are available while you’re looking for a version control solution.

By: Ivan

Ivan — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 14:47:47 +0000

Excellent article. I’ve been looking for version control alternatives for my designer friends who just can’t understand anything about GIT

By: colin

colin — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:20:07 +0000

aaannnd, I updated my Version Cue and everything appears to be working correctly. Back on the horse!

By: colin

colin — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 17:59:50 +0000

So, I stepped out with Adobe Version Cue CS3 and it’s already stopped working on me. It’s barking at me:

“Version Cue CS3 could not be started.” Then it tells me to check the server logs which seem to indicate that it’s having some issues finding the database?

Any ideas?

If I can’t get this fixed I may be 1 and out.

Great article though.

By: AlaskaW

AlaskaW — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 17:22:18 +0000

We use Subversion also, and we don’t think it is slow unless you are checking out a couple thousand files. But once the job is done, it is great!

Repos & version control are a necessity in our work. And yes, keep the files on a different box and back them up regularly.