macOS file diff app, Kaleidoscope, acquired by Letter Opener GmbH | Hacker News Reader

macOS file diff app, Kaleidoscope, acquired by Letter Opener GmbH

kaleidoscope.app

84 pointsdplgk66 comments

I was very happy to read that when I saw the news. The app has been in a half-dead state for years and it took me a long time to convince myself to buy it. It always felt like buying a dead product that won't get any updates, but then every once in a while there was an update to fix some bugs while it was sold from company to company.

I hope the new maintainers will be more interested in maintaining it. Kaleidoscope is a good app, but the high price point felt mismatched to the lack of basic updates. I assumed it was abandoned until now.

Hopefully the new owners don’t try to squeeze more money out of existing customers by switching to a subscription model or making an arbitrary paid 3.0 version at this point.

That's what happened to Cornerstone (SVN GUI client), and they lost me as a customer. I would gladly pay for updates on my own schedule but a subscription isn't worthwhile for me.

Looks like it's a single guy, that has been a mac dev for quite some time, developing Letter Opener (https://winmail.help/)

I love the quote at the end of the page: "Made with a special for winmail.dat files."

I'm a bit worried that he doesn't have the manpower to push kaleidoscope forward, but tbh I wouldn't mind paying a small subscription fee for having it maintained, working on folders, e.t.c.

I really want the high quality mac software back that we had 10-15 years ago. And I wouldn't mind paying for it, even if it's more than the ridiculous 1$ one time handout that we've somehow accepted as normal.

So good luck to Christopher!

As someone who has made indie Mac apps for a living, it's a tough market.

I've done well and made good money on my own, but launching a new Mac only desktop product these days without a subscription component is hard. Launching one without subscription is even harder, because your revenue is one off.

Apps that are not extremely mainstream are bound to make just a few thousand or a few tens of thousands a year. That is likely not enough to build out a proper app dev team.

What about starting With one off and switching to subscription? That appears to be the trend right now in the Apple ecosystem at least. I’ve abandoned some apps and subscribed to some as more keep doing that shift.

I wonder if starting off and growing a bit by being one off the switching wouldn’t be better business. Of course that strategy is considered repugnant by many. But I’m putting that aside.

One weird thing that usually turns me off too much is when the one off payments are less than the subscription per year price. Like Noteplan 3 per year is more than Noteplan 2 Mac and iOS separate purchases.

You'll get destroyed in reviews. It's horrible. It's a shitstorm you know will come when you make the change.

I actually agree that plenty of apps don't warrant a subscription. Do you want to end up paying a monthly fee for everything? It's a hard one to balance.

What about launching on Setapp?[1] Do you have any experience or have you talked to another indie Mac dev with experience? I’m a user and kind of a fan, curious to hear the dev side of things.

[1] https://setapp.com/

All the developers I have talked to tell me it's a waste of time and money, for the most part. It's more of "sure, why not" channel. But if someone has different experiences I would be happy to hear them.

It's really sad how apple killed their whole app ecosystem with their 99¢ pricing policy. A lot of the apps on there were once mac apps that you'd see on every std installation.

Would you be open to some questions from someone wanting to launch their first mac app?

Sure, e-mail is in my profile!

Thx j-pb! I read about the problem with working on folders in a couple of reviews, but never ran into it myself. Could you contact me at support@kaleidoscope.app so we can go into more details? Cheers, Christopher

This product-despite how little maintenance it has received over the years-has performed wonderfully. The $69 spent four a high quality tool that helps me work more efficiently has been money well spent. The fact that this app has needed so little changes over the years is testament to how well it was made the first time. I’m hoping that new ownership will keep this running well for years to come

Speaking of file diffs, I use this to diff pdf files. I have used it so many times, I love it. Not affiliated with them, just an awesome tool.

https://vslavik.github.io/diff-pdf

Glad that it found a new home. Last time I checked it got passed around from acqui-hire to acqui-hire, only to somehow end up at a defense contractor.

Thx, j-pb!

I like this app, A LOT.

But, the price tag of US$69.99 doesn't justify its value for my use case of diff and merge in git.

Yeah it's steep but you pay for it once, you're really subsiding X months of development and support.

Exactly. This year, a bunch of iOS apps switched from one-and-done to subscription plans. If you want to re-monetize your app, the other option is selling it, I guess.

With more people mentioning this. I’d be really interested in some database or site etc that keeps track of how many apps are switching from one time payment to subscription. And if the subscription price per year is more than the one time too.

Open source alternative suggestions?

There's Meld Merge but IMO Beyond Compare is better but it's also proprietary. Kdiff3 is also an option but the UI isn't great.

Looks like it doesn't just compare text but also images and folders.

If all you need is diffing source code, I’d really consider buying a Jetbrains IDE (disclaimer: no affiliated, just a fan) which provides this out of the box, isn’t much more expensive and has an additional use as an IDE :)

I thought most of the Jetbrains products were subscriptions? Kaleidoscope is a one-time-purchase app. I paid for it a handful of years ago, one time, and it has worked perfectly for my needs ever since.

JetBrains offers a couple of models for licensing. One of those is a "subscribe until you don't want to pay for it, then the last major version that you subscribed too is yours to keep forever." Another is "pay for the specific version once and be done with it, here's your license key."

I am not affiliated with JetBrains. I have a continuing "pay once a year" "subscription." Should I ever need to cancel that subscription, or let it lapse (I did that between July 2019 and August 2020), I can still use the last major version from the prior year.

I think the JetBrains model of "we have a variety of ways for you to give us money that is fair to us and you" strikes a good balance.

There are a number of tools I have taken off of my workbench because they have gone subscription only: Tower, 1Password, and so forth. I only purchase "one time licenses" of MS Office these days (we're about 3 years behind). I'm in the process of excising Adobe from my life, but unfortunately finding it rather hard.

One of those is a "subscribe until you don't want to pay for it, then the last major version that you subscribed too is yours to keep forever."

That's not completely accurate. First of all, this only applies if you subscribe for at leas a year (e.g. a 1 month subscription is not enough to get a perpetual license). Secondly, you only get a perpetual license for the product available at the time of purchase or 12 months prior.

So, e.g. if you buy a yearly subscription for CLion now, then you will get a perpetual license for 2020.2.z (the current version), but not for 2020.3.z. Of course, you can renew the license after a year and get perpetual licenses for newer releases as well.

(Maybe this is what you were saying, but it doesn't read like that ;).)

Another is "pay for the specific version once and be done with it, here's your license key."

They don't have that model for their IDEs anymore, right?

That said, I am also a happy user of JetBrains products, and especially their All Products Pack is really a good deal (if you frequently switch between languages).

Usually you use Jetbrains products for the whole IDE, not just diff. At their price tag, and their regular updates, it's much worth it.

You get Intellij Idea Community Edition for free and its open source. It has everything you need.

IntelliJ Idea Community is for Java without Spring support.

If you want Spring support, or you want to use other JetBrains IDEs for other languages, you have to pay.

Personally, I'm happy to fork my money to them. They make the best IDEs out there.

Mac OS has also "FileMerge" as part of Xcode (free).

> If all you need is diffing source code, I’d really consider buying

That's a giant leap. If you just need one thing, don't buy a IDE! If you just need to diff source code, use `diff` cli. Available everywhere and in some more places.

If you need something more than diff, find a proper comparison tool, unless you're already using an IDE of course. Or unless you need to also write/read code in the same tool. Then maybe IDE is fitting.

Your recommendation is very strange.

I use IDEA Ultimate but I deliberately avoid the built in version control and diffing 99% of the time.

They’re great tools for writing code (in spite of their not-quite-native UI and heavy resource requirements) but anything I can do separately (git/hg, vagrant, terminal/ssh, diffing), I do - the IDE-integrated interfaces for those things are pretty much always worse and slower.

If you are a tech user and like comparing various kinds of files, not just code for git commits, I'd recommend Beyond Compare, it's the most powerful (albeit not the most sexy) app I've seen so far

Xcode comes with a very rudimantary but feature complete and free graphical diff util called FileMerge. You can call it from the terminal as 'opendiff'[0]. It works great with Git as difftool or mergetool and it even supports diffing entire directories.

[0] https://www.unix.com/man-page/osx/1/opendiff/

I had no idea that FileMerge had a CLI (which apparently also supports `opendiff file1 file2`). That's quite helpful, thanks for the tip!

Almost all graphical applications and tools for macOS have a CLI counterpart. Often they are not as intuitive or well thought out as most GNU CLI tools, but they get the job done and enable a lot of automation without using the mouse. Things like: networksetup/systemsetup, tmutil (timemachine), open (open files in application, I often use 'open .' to open de current dir in Finder), screencapture, defaults (edit application setting), security (keychain interaction), diskutil, osascript (applescript) and many more.

‘open -a <app name> <path>’ to open a file with a given app.

Echo what others have said about what a great application this is, and though the price was steep I’ve found its usefulness has paid me back many times over.

My worry about so many applications switching to a subscription model, is that if you ever find yourself in a bad economic situation, and looking for work - then when you need them the most, you may not be able to afford the tools you’ve been depending on.

My biggest gripe about Kildescope is still that you can't modify the file paths directly and folder diff have a tree view so diffing nested folders just results in a billion tabs. Affinity unbelievably slow.

Seems like Meld/Beyond Compare are still the only serious diff+merge tool out there UI/UX wise.

Tree view for folder diffing is on the list. Could you let me know what you mean with "modify the file paths directly"?

I want to be able to directly modify the path of the files/folders being compared like in other diff tools. This is mostly used for diffing across logs and releases with structured folder hierarchies like:

<project>/releases/<n>/<resource> or <project>/logs/<instance>/service/<worker>/<resource>

In essence what I think I want is just more of a meld/bcomp like workflow but with more mac-native UI/UX.

I see

I love Kaleidoscope. It was a bit of a struggle to persuade myself that it was worth the fairly chunky initial outlay, but it’s so fast and easy to proof text changes with it, that it has absolutely made my life $70 more pleasurable over the last couple of years. Thanks to Christopher for sorting it out with a future.

Thx Robin!

Here are the alternatives:

FileMerge - part of Xcode. Free. use opendiff to launch from CLI

BBEdit - My go to editor for the Mac. Freemium. Available both on the Mac app store and their website as a download.

VS Code - Also free.

SourceTree - Acquired by Atlassian. Also free. Good for git context to diff branches, commits and modified but uncommitted files in current branch.

I am adding Meld to the list.

https://meldmerge.org/

Kaleidoscope is a Mac app. "On OS X, Meld is not yet officially supported"

> OSX users can install Meld using Homebrew (or Macports, Fink, etc.), or there are unofficial native builds available from the Meld for OSX project.

Its available in Homebrew to try.

The linked repo seems to be a fork of a mirror of the Gnome Meld [1] application.

[1] https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/meld

p4merge! Just `brew cask install p4v` and you're set. It supports viewing local, base and remote in three-way merges, which really helps when resolving conflicts IMHO.

Also: Beyond Compare - https://www.scootersoftware.com/features.php (Mac+PC+Linux)

Sublime Merge, works on Windows/Linux/macOS. Its free unless you want the dark theme (easy to fix in a hex editor though I just bought a license I guess its a bit steep price for some people).

On Windows, I used WinMerge a long time ago. Not sure how it is now, and its not available on macOS.

Everyone saying which app they prefer, and I'm wondering why you don't just use one of the many lightweight, FOSS CLI diffing tools that already exists.

I use both. Terminal tools for quick diffs and Kaleidoscope for larger diffs that I need to read more carefully. It's more readable since the value-add UI elements on and around the text can use fine-grained drawing/layout rather than blocky TUI stuff.

Big fan of the app, and I've met the founder of Letter Opener GmbH before and he's a great guy. Very cool.

Thx orta! :)

I didn't know about this software. Install and try the trial version with:

$ brew cask install kaleidoscope

Isn’t using cask deprecated? Like just do brew install now?

Yeah, you're right. It's my habit, and it's required for the zap subcommand, but it's no longer necessary for install.

But what about software, which is both available as cask and normally, such as docker?

That's a good question... I actually don't know what happens. I'm guessing they prefer the official binaries, but that's just a guess.

What are some good resources on how go develop apps for MacOS?

It’s really slow on big files.

I will look into this!

$70 for an application that is just git with a GUI?

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