vectorLab: The Digital Octane Development Blog

Ok, I may be over exaggerating a bit by saying version control saving your life. But it can certainly save you large amounts of frustration. Picture if you will, you’re working on a tight deadline; you have just about finished with your project and it’s the 11th hour. You’ve done a bunch of work but you only  have 1 copy on our laptop. Your laptop overheats and will not turn on! Now that the stage is set, you may be asking “What the Fruit is version control and how can it help me with this problem?” Basically version control is a way for you and your design/development team to work on the same project and even the same files with out having to manually make copies as you make changes. As you make edits to any file within the repo older “copies” (I use copies loosely in this description because it’s a bit more complicated than that behind the scenes) will be saved. File version control is really the tip of the iceberg regarding projects like Subversion which have project “branching”, file merging and more robust features. Check this out Wikipedia for more info on Version Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control.

You may notice that some open source projects such as Tweener, swfobject and PaperVision 3D are all on code.google. Each project has a repo accessible through a UI such as tortoise svn(Win) or versions(Mac). This makes it a lot easier to make sure your files are up to date with out having to download zips and manage the files yourself.

So which one should I use?

At Digital Octane we utilize both a Subversion Repository along with a Dropbox account(s). This isn’t a comparison between any syncing / version control apps. Each have their own benefits and it really depends on how you plan on utilizing your files when choosing one.

Dropbox

If you are a small boutique shop like we are, Dropbox is extremely useful for syncing/sharing files between our team, clients and freelancers. It’s a very simple client side installation for any user sign up is a snap. Once the install is complete the user will have a series of Dropbox folders added to their Documents folder.

Making file sharing a breeze for non tech savvy clients. For those of you that are used to another method for version control you may feel a bit hindered by the lack of file/folder controls. If this is your first jump into remote file syncing or version control for your files. You wont really know what you are missing. Just knowing that if you accidentally lost a file or need to access your file from the web you can.

Subversion: The 30 second breakdown

Subversion’s overall controls are more robust compared to the abilities of Dropbox, but there comes a bit of  administration with Subversion and a little bit of know how (Which I will not get into here) to get things up and running. If you choose to go the Subversion route. You will be greatly rewarded for your hard work.

Here are a list of features within subversion

Some things to keep in mind about subversion

1. You will need to install subversion on a dedicated server/machine that you can access locally and/or remotely.
2. It’s in your best interest to install client side controls such has tortoise svn(Win) or versions(Mac) to make it easier on your users.
3. Read up on project trunks and branching. If you have a good process for branching your code base. It can make deploying code to dev, staging and production servers much easier.
4. Subversion has pretty good integration with task management systems such as Jira (using a plugin) I am sure others are out there as well.
5. The Subversion project is quite large and community is very active.

So what did we cover?

In this article I talked about Subversion and Dropbox but there are a ton of other projects out there and Adobe has actually started shipping their own version control within their Creative Suite. Regardless of which product you choose. It’s a good idea to start implementing version control today if you haven’t already.

Oh and if you are interested in using Dropbox how about using this link (https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTUxNDA4ODk) so we get a referal bonus?

Tags: Dropbox, Subversion, tortoise svn, Version Control, versions

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 12th, 2009 at 5:27 am and is filed under Work Smarter not Harder. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.