First Thoughts on BC4 Mac

[renatocoral]

Look and Feel of BC4

Hi,

first I'd like to thank the Scooter Software team for bringing the absolute best Compare, Diff, Sync, ... tool to the Mac. I'm a long time user of the Windows version and have been waiting for it on the mac for some years.

I'm using it for less than a week and so far have not found any serious bugs.

It feels fast and fully featured.

My first impression of this Mac version is that although feature wise it is the best software in it's class, some details of the look and feel still make it look not like a native Mac app.

The Toolbar:
1. Usually Mac apps have the option to show Icons, Icon and Text or Text only for the items in the Toolbar. In BC4, I miss the option for icons only, especially in small screens (MBA 11").
2. The Toggle buttons on the Toolbar could behave like preferences pane in Pages or OmniGraffle for example.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B93G...it?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B93G...it?usp=sharing
3. The dropdown menu from "Sessions" in the Toolbar could show bigger options like the screenshot below
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B93G...it?usp=sharing
4. The rightmost icon under the toolbar seems to be almost off the screen no matter how much I resize the window.
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B93G...it?usp=sharing

Preferences Pane:
1. Most native Mac apps show the preferences panel with horizontal tabs on top. Some, like Xcode have a as many as 10 tabs which is almost the same as the 11 tabs of BC4 and it still fits nicely on the interface.
2. In most apps there is no Apply button, even CANCEL and OK buttons on the Prefs Panel. Also there is no preview because every action is done immediately.
3. Usually on Lion and ML, the scroll bars are not visible. Not sure if you guys are using the same container element or if you chose to show the scroll bar as a default behavior.
4. While Scrolling on the trackpad with the mouse Pref Panel, if the mouse cursor is over any text box, the scrolling will stop and you have to move the mouse out of the text box to be able to scroll again.
5. In Preferences -> Toolbars, etc. the items listed in the  menu are actually in the application menu (Beyond Compare) not in the Apple Menu.

These are just some of my thoughts. Not sure how you are porting this tool to the Mac and if these changes would be possible.

Again, thanks for this great software. I'm continuing testing it.

[glospete]

I have only just moved from Windows to a Mac and so the OSX operating system is very very new to me! The absence of a BC prog for the Mac was a shock and really concerned me as it is/was one of my most used progrs on the PC. But the Beta version has been amazing:

1. Installation went perfectly with not a hint that it was a Beta version.
2. It seems to be working perfectly for me - at least for my limited needs.
3. However I can't see how to select a folder in Finder and then right click and choose that as the folder to use in BC. Am I missing something?
4. I have added items to the Toolbar (Move to ...) and that worked exactly as designed.

More comments as I use it more.
Thanks for a great app.

[Aaron]

OSX 10.6 moved what you would be familiar with on the right click menu a level deeper, into a submenu called Servcies. Do you see our shortcuts in there?

[Aaron]

Thanks for the feedback. We're trying to make the product feel like a native Mac app, but we also want it to function the same on Windows, Linux, and OSX. We'll definitely look at your suggestions and see what we can do.