Yesterday I launched MacHg 0.9.7. Its quite a nice release if I do say so myself. I am quickly closing in on 1.0.0 which I will announce to the world. (So far I have just announced these release on the Mercurial mailing lists, not version tracker, cnet, iusethis, etc.)

Only some more minor bug fixes remain, and there are no substantial problems I am aware of in the functionality of MacHg. Thats a good thing! I still of course have many plans for MacHg beyond 1.0, like hunk level control in the commit dialog and a staging area like gitx has. (I like this feature of gitx but maybe would like to be able to do this through a visual diff rather than just hunk control.) Also on the cards is drag and drop patch control, and annotation on steroids.

I stumbled over an interesting article the other day when trying to figure out how to turn BBEdit TextFactories into droplets.

Recently I have struggled a with several characters in the Mercurial development scene. Interestingly this article about UI design and Linux mindset thinking although old, was so on the money its eerily scary. (at least with some of the characters I have encountered…) Things haven’t changed. Tellingly from the article was the quote:

The list of fantastic open source developer software is long. The list of fantastic open source GUI software is short. This is not a function of chance.