BC3 for Mac?

[John Whitley]

Originally Posted by mel

Why don't you post the Mac project on http://www.kickstarter.com/ ?

Another possibility: I'd definitely be in for paid, early prerelease access. A manageable number of such folks would be an audience invested in providing feedback to help shape the final product.

[Craig]

I've updated the first post in this thread with the current state of things. In short, we are working on it, and we will have some sort of public alpha/beta tests.

If you want to be notified when we have something, subscribe to this thread or the News & Announcements forum, or follow us on either Facebook or Twitter.

Scooter Software itself is healthy. We won't need either Kickstarter or paid pre-releases to stay afloat until the release.

[jadik]

I am thrilled to hear that the Scooter Software team is developing a version of BeyondCompare for Mac. Although there are a number of file/folder comparison products for OS X, none seem to be as comprehensive or capable as BeyondCompare.

Since having switched my primary workstation to Mac, BC is one of the tools I miss most... I look forward to hearing news of availability!

Thank you for your ongoing efforts... they have helped make the day-to-day systems management chores far less tedious.

Best regards,
J.Adik

[curmudgeon99]

Gentlemen,
I am a paying user of BeyondCompare. At work I am forced to use Windows. But at home I only use a Mac. If you are curious about the appetite for BC3 on the Mac, it's huge. I know so many professional developers who have abandoned Windows for the Mac OS. There is a large user base you could tap on the Mac.

Thank you,
Tom

[driden]

I've tried several different mac file comparison utilities and they all have one thing in common - they absolutely suck compared to BC.

I know I would personally love it if a simplified version of BC without all of the extra bells and whistles were released early with the full enchilada to follow later. Just getting a good working folder compare would be worth a ton to me initially.

It is currently excruciating to have to compare a bunch of directories on the Mac.... Especially if you're a 10+ year BC user.

Please consider a partial release with more to follow

[Narbat]

Personally, I think a partial release would be a bad idea. It sounds like a major support headache for Scooter and a distraction from completing the full Mac version.

But FWIW, the Windows version of BC3 runs fine and dandy under Wine on my Mac. It's not as nice as a native Mac version would be, of course, but it's way better than nothing! It should certainly be enough to satisfy the need for BC while the full native Mac app is being developed.

[driden]

While I agree that it would be nice to have the full enchilada.... This thread started in 2007.

Today's date being what it is, I have to wonder if a partial version after 4+ (nearing 5) years isn't better than one with a tone of features that I rarely use.

I use the basics day in and day out.

I am currently running the CrossOver version but it certainly isn't the same. I have to browse to all of the directories which is a real pain.

[driden]

The 4+ years is based on this thread in support (Nov 2007). I don't know when they actually started work...

[Narbat]

I used WineBottler as the front-end with which I made the Wine installation for BC3. I don't know about CrossOver, but WineBottler packages things up to make the Windows program look like a native Mac app. You can even pass command-line args to the app. I have the following bash alias:

alias bc3='open -n -a /Applications/WineApps/Beyond\ Compare\ 3.app'

I can start a comparison from Terminal by simply typing:

bc3 file1 file2
bc3 dir1 dir2

You can also pass any of BC3's usual options, but I don't use them enough to bother remembering them. The above handles 99% of my usage, for the remainder I just point-and-grunt with the mouse.

I'm sure it would be possible to create some AppleScript wrapper to use from Finder if you want to emulate BC3's Windows Explorer context menu. I tend to avoid Finder so I've never bothered to do so.

I'd be surprised if you couldn't do something similar with CrossOver. If not, well... WineBottler is free.

[Craig]

We started full time work on the Mac version last year.

The release will be full featured. All of the different viewers share code or at least have very similar structures, so getting all of them up and running doesn't take substantially more time than getting one going. It's not a native Objective C/Cocoa app though, so we've had to spend a lot more time getting the basic infrastructure working.