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Comment by etwigg | Hacker News Reader

How much do you think you'd be willing to pay for an SVG diff? One issue I'm grappling with is that I think people are willing to pay a lot to diff their CAD files, and probably nothing for their text files. There's a lot of useful stuff in-between, but I don't have a good feel for what price is appropriate.

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Myself? Sorry to say, but I probably wouldn't pay, seeing as I am a programmer by trade. This was just for a little side project where I wanted to collaborate with my little sister on our own version of xkcd's "Click and Drag" [0] which we work on over a long period of time. I figured using Inkscape and version controlling the SVG's was the best way to collaborate with her, even though she's not familiar with version control (just finishing high school, interested in arts and not coding).

But I take your point that professional designers tend to pay for their tools, whereas programmers often find an open source tool. I guess it comes from the fact that programmers can program their own tools, where as designers cannot.

I recall a project hitting the front page which focused on visual diffs of 3D model which you may be interested in [1].

[0] - http://xkcd.com/1110/

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4393704

No way! My little brother drew most of DiffPlug's icons (and took the photos used in the demos). He is also just finishing high school, and part of why I made the image differ was to help bring him into the version control fold.

Thanks for the 3D differ link! The conventional wisdom when I talk to people about DiffPlug is that I should make it into a web service. For diffing, I think a desktop app is better than a web service for a few different reasons, but one of them is that the cloud is a pain for big documents like CAD files. I haven't had any real data to support that so far, but the comments thread for that link is very helpful!

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