Subversion is arguably the world's most popular source control system, and many a developer's best friend. It keeps things organized, it helps you gracefully recover from your mistakes, and it makes managing branches and versions of your projects dead simple. What isn't always dead simple is setting up or managing the Subversion repository. Sure, the software is free but, your developer's time definitely isn't. If you've delegated the hassles of managing your source control to one of your senior developers, you're likely making a crucial mistake that is costing you money.

Beanstalk takes the burden of setting up and maintaining Subversion out of the equation. For $15 a month and up -- or free for a tiny project not needing per-commit backups -- Beanstalk gives you Subversion as well as integration with Twitter, Basecamp, Campfire, and more. Use any Subversion client you want! Cooler still, if you're using Beanstalk's SVN to manage a website, they've made it super simple to set up FTP deployment on commit, so every time you commit a change it can go live on your domain.

For cost to hassle ratio, I personally have to say spending $15 bucks a month for someone else to worry about keeping my Subversion server running and backed up might be the best $15 I've ever spent.

Panic Inc.'s Coda, the one-window web development wonder for Mac OS X, has just been updated to version 1.5. Coda is a great program, designed to put source editing, FTP, CSS and command line access all in one application. It's a great, great application for developers and is definitely one of my most-used applications.

With version 1.5, Coda adds Subversion to its tool-belt, which is sure to make many, many users extremely happy. Git might be the new hotness, but seeing as graphical SVN clients are just now starting to trickle onto OS X, this is great news to any Mac developer.

In typical Coda-style, Subversion access is clean and easy to manage. Source-control is set-up on a per-site basis. If your existing site already has a SVN directory, Coda detects it automatically. You can also enter in a repository's URL and login details to checkout a copy of a repository if no local copy exists.

In addition to Subversion support, Coda 1.5 also boasts a much-improved find and replace system. The find and replace command can now span all open files, files in a directory, or files in the local root site. In the past, this was one of my only problems with Coda -- I had to search through each file to find a specific line of code, instead of being able to search across a group of files. This is great for updating an image directory or changing a file name across a bunch of PHP or CSS files.

The "Books" menu has also received a big update: support for custom books. Coda's Books feature works by connecting the user to a web page housing a book's complete text. Out of the box, Coda comes with access to a CSS, HTML, PHP and Javascript manual. When writing anything in those languages or formats, you can also refer to the reference books to look up commands or syntax rules. This can be very handy. Now, with the custom book feature, you can add other online books. For instance, I added the Django Book to my bookshelf so that I can have easy access to it anytime I'm working on a site that uses that framework.

Coda's Clips feature has also been improved with support for groupings, importing, and exporting. There are lots of other improvements (check out the release notes) that make an already great program even better.

Coda 1.5 is a free update for all existing Coda users. You can download a 15-day trial from Panic's site. Pricing is $99 for new users, $85 for existing Transmit 3 customers. Coda requires OS X 10.4+.

One of the fundamental tools for developers is not just their development environment of choice, but also their version control system of choice. The debate over just which version control system is undoubtedly set to rage on for eternity, however one of the more popular systems is Subversion. On the Mac, up until now there's been a number of choices: Terminal (command-line) which is built into the OS and includes Subversion as part of OS X Leopard, svnX - another open-source graphical user interface, or using the built-in Subversion support in Apple's OS X development IDE Xcode.

For some of us here at Download Squad, a fear of the command-line, compounded with a little loathing of the svnX interface made the announcement of Versions.app - over a year ago - more than a little exciting. Promising an elegant and truly OS X interface to work with Subversion, it's taken a long time to come to fruition - however the betas to date do appear to deliver.

After having used Versions on a daily basis since its debut 2 weeks ago, it's certainly showing a great deal of promise - and makes version control far friendlier. As others have noted, the application not only makes working with existing repositories easy, but also has quick links to Subversion web-service Beanstalk, allowing you to easily create a new online repository and add it to Versions.

Pricing for Versions will be set 'when version 1.0 ships', and currently all (free-to-use) betas expire on July 1st.

The Download Squad team got really excited this morning. When we contemplated installing Paint-Mono, we pictured it and GIMP arming themselves with swords, screaming "There can be only one!" We thought there would be an epic battle, and the victor would lop off the other's head in a firestorm of light.

Instead, we ended up compiling Mono.

Paint-Mono is a Unix port of Paint.NET. To install, it requires Mono 1.2.6, your favorite flavor of Unix (OSX, BSD, Linux, or Solaris), and a Subversion client. (Here's a little warning: if you're running Ubuntu Gutsy, you don't have the right version of Mono. Deb packages for this version are hard to find, so that most likely means compiling from source. The Mono installer didn't work for us).

So is it a GIMP killer? At this point we'd have to say no. We couldn't get Paint-Mono to compile (even after installing Mono 1.2.6). According to Miguel de Icaza, most of the features in Paint.NET have been ported over to Paint-Mono, with more to come. It might be a nice alternative as it develops, but we'll have to wait and see. Right now, it could have all the features of GIMP and more, but we'd still recommend GIMP to our friends just because they'd actually be able to install it and run it on their Windows, Linux, or even Mac computers.

[via Digg]

Karl Fogel is no stranger to open source development. He makes a living writing programs (and enjoys playing piano as well). In fact, Karl spent 5 years toiling on the Subversion project. So he took his experience, zoomed way out of the process, and explains it all in a book: Producing Open Source Software. It's very well-written, in plain words, and cuts to the heart of the matter: herding squirrels. Not really, but there is a lot of great info on the purpose, point, and procedures common to open source software. I'll agree with Karl, it's too easy to just say it's fun to write apps, and hope to slap together a group to do just that. Great read for those of you looking to get into the oss world. By the way, you can buy the book from O'Reilly, but the link I provided will also take you the PDF and other ebook format versions...