Release Notes

Cornerstone has been priced at $59.00 for a single-user license since its initial introduction in 2008. With the introduction of Cornerstone 3 today we are increasing the price of a single-user license to $69.00. This change is effective immediately.

Volume pricing tiers have been adjusted accordingly. Please see the Cornerstone Store for more information.

Cornerstone 3 represents a milestone for us. We’ve never invested so much time and energy into a release of Cornerstone before. From the small details in toolbar icons to the immense challenge of sandboxing an app of Cornerstone’s complexity, we’ve put our hearts and souls into this release. We hope it shows.

The most obvious difference is the completely redesigned user interface. Icons have been lavished with attention and components such as the Source List and Inspector have been rewritten from scratch. With a focus on aesthetics and workflow, we think you’ll find it not only gorgeous to look at but also an indispensable part of your toolset.

We’ve also invested heavily into re-engineering significant parts of Cornerstone to embrace sandboxing, Apple’s security technology. It’s something that other developers have shied away from, but we’ve embraced it and believe in the protection sandboxing delivers. So now, even if Cornerstone is compromised by malicious software, the other stuff on your Mac will remain safe.

So there you have it. Cornerstone 3 represents an incredible overhaul. From reviewing your own work to merging others’ changes, Cornerstone puts powerful and intuitive tools at your fingertips.

We can’t wait for you to try it out.

We are excited to announce that we will be discounting Cornerstone 2 by 50% in July, from the standard price of $59 to just $29. The offer will be valid from July 1st to July 31st 2013. This applies both to purchases made through the online store on zennaware.com and the Mac App Store.

Please note that the following restrictions apply:

• Full Licenses Only

  The discount only applies to full licenses. The pricing remains the same for upgrade licenses.

• Volume Discounts

  We are not offering volume discounts on full Cornerstone 2 licenses while this offer is valid. Volume discounts remain in effect for upgrade licenses.

• Other Discounts and Offers

  We are also not offering student or non-profit discounts on Cornerstone 2 licenses while this offer is valid. However, student and non-profit discounts are still available for upgrade licenses.

  Other offers valid during July 2013 are also limited to upgrade licenses.

Since the release of Cornerstone 2, prices quoted in the Cornerstone store have not included VAT for customers located in the EU. Instead, VAT has been added to the price during checkout at the rate appropriate for the customer’s region.

As of March 8th 2012, prices quoted in the Cornerstone store include VAT for EU customers in order that prices are consistent with those quoted by Apple in the Mac App Store.

We’re big fans of Beanstalk. In fact we like them so much we now host all of our production repositories there.

Beanstalk offers top-notch cloud-based version control with great deployment, integration and collaboration features. It also has one of the best user interfaces.

And that got us thinking: if we could integrate one of the leading repository-hosting platforms with the ultimate Subversion client, Mac users around the world would be in for a treat.

So that’s what we did.

The integration makes it super-easy to start using Beanstalk’s Subversion hosting with Cornerstone. If you already have a Beanstalk account just copy the URL from your repository’s info page and Cornerstone will automatically add the information it needs. All you need to do is provide your account details and you’re done.

To celebrate the new partnership, all Beanstalk account holders receive a 10% discount coupon for Cornerstone. Just log into Beanstalk and either create a new repository or visit the repository help page to get your discount code for use in the Cornerstone web store.

In October we wrote about our plans to add support for Subversion 1.7 to Cornerstone 2.7. It was our hope that this would be ready by the end of 2011.

Unfortunately this won’t be the case.

We knew that supporting 1.7 would take more work than previous versions. We described it as “disruptive” but we didn’t anticipate just how disruptive it would be.

The Problem: Incompatible APIs, Performance Regression and SQLite

Subversion 1.7 includes a complete re-write of the code that manages working copies. While the Subversion developers have attempted to hide the differences between the old and new implementations they were unfortunately unable to do so with 100% compatibility.

For example, 1.7’s re-implementation of the working copy status API used by Cornerstone is now 10x slower than the same API in Subversion 1.6. It provides the same output, but what previously completed in 200 ms now take over 2 seconds. We don’t think this kind of performance degredation is acceptable and spent some time migrating Cornerstone to use newer and faster APIs.

But the most disruptive change results from Subversion’s use of SQLite.

Cornerstone makes heavy use of threading – almost all interactions with Subversion take place on background threads to prevent the user interface from blocking – and SQLite places strict constraints on how it’s data structures can (or, more accurately can’t) be shared between threads. As a result, certain data structures that could be shared between threads prior to 1.7 (and had worked absolutely fine in 1.3, 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6) now raise errors as soon as they’re accessed from different threads.

The Solution: Building a Platform for Future Development

We came to the conclusion that we would have to re-think certain core aspects of how Cornerstone interacts with Subversion. The constraints introduced by SQLite make it substantially more complicated to use Subversion’s APIs from multiple threads. We ended up having to re-design the way in which key data structures are allocated and managed by Cornerstone.

This has taken a lot of work. We’ve been working on this at full-tilt for the last four months, dedicating all available resources to re-building key areas of the application to serve as a solid foundation for future development.

We’ve also totally re-written Cornerstone’s security stack to enable this new design, and have done so in a way that enables key improvements such as support for certificate-based authentication and temporary (i.e. non-persistent) credentials.

Finally, we’ve also re-thought how Cornerstone should store its credentials and have replaced key areas of the Subversion authentication stack with alternatives that use the Mac OS X keychain.

These are big and worthwhile improvements. And rather than take shortcuts or rush these changes, we’ll be taking the time to get them right.

We now plan to release Cornerstone 2.7 before the end of February 2012.

Thanks for your patience.

Yesterday the Apache project released Subversion 1.7, a major update to our favorite version control system. This new version brings with it some much-requested improvements that will affect the lives of Cornerstone users in a positive way.

The most significant improvements in 1.7 are:

• Improved Working Copy Metadata Storage

  All versions of Subversion prior to 1.7 have stored housekeeping information about a working copy’s contents in hidden .svn folders distributed throughout the working copy. While not normally visible, these pesky folders have nonetheless been the cause of issues for users. In particular, moving or removing .svn folders (or the folders that contain them) with Finder or Terminal could result in Subversion (and Cornerstone by extension) no longer being able to access that working copy.

  While tools such as Finder and Terminal should still not be used to move and rename working copy items (you should always use Cornerstone or another Subversion app to do so), Subversion should be able to better handle such situations.

  So where did the data in the .svn folders go? It’s still there, but it’s now stored in a single hidden .svn folder at the top of your working copy.

  But what about performance?

  The Subversion developers claim that the new storage format should significantly improve performance. However, our own experience doesn’t support this. If anything, our testing shows 1.7 to be slower than 1.6, with real-world working copies being between 30% and 100% slower than 1.6.

  The bottom line? While the new metadata format in 1.7 should simplify working copy management – and make it more robust – it won’t necessarily be any faster.

• Improved HTTP Performance

  To be honest, Subversion’s HTTP network performance has always been, ahem, less than stellar, particularly on high-latency networks. If you use a hosted Subversion repository on the other side of the planet, then you’ll be accustomed to 3+ second roundtrip times for even the simplest actions, such as listing the contents of a repository folder or comparing a working copy against the repository. And heavyweight actions such as commits and updates can take much longer.

  This poor performance stems from Subversion’s support for the WebDav DeltaV specification. DeltaV’s failure to gain any significant traction meant that the promised inter-operability benefits were never realized, leaving only the overhead of a chatty, complex and inefficient protocol.

  1.7 implements a new, simplified HTTP protocol, which promises to reduce the time it takes to perform most common actions. The catch? You’ll need to upgrade your server to 1.7 so that it can speak this new protocol.

If you are interested in finding out more about Subversion 1.7 then we recommend that you take a look at the Subversion 1.7 release notes.

When Will Cornerstone Support 1.7?

We will roll out full support for 1.7 with the release of Cornerstone 2.7, which we plan to release before the end of 2011.

We have been working with 1.7 for quite some time. While 1.7 is not a particularly significant release in terms of end-user features, it is a disruptive release for Cornerstone. Re-writing – re-architecting even – certain aspects of the application to incorporate Subversion 1.7 is going to take some time, but we believe it will be worth the wait.

What About Cornerstone 1.5?

Active development of Cornerstone 1.x ceased with the release of 1.5 in September 2009, over two years ago.

Much water has flowed under the bridge since then, with over 4,000 changes committed to Cornerstone during the development of 2.0 and the subsequent releases of 2.1, 2.2, 2.5 and 2.6. Cornerstone 2 has diverged so far from 1.5 that it’s impossible for us to target both versions simultaneously with the integration of 1.7.

Therefore we will not be adding 1.7 support to Cornerstone 1, instead concentrating our efforts on getting 1.7 support into the hands of Cornerstone 2 users as soon as possible.

If you are still using Cornerstone 1.x and want to enjoy the benefits of Subversion 1.7 support then you will need to upgrade to Cornerstone 2.

We are excited to announce that we will be discounting Cornerstone 2 from the standard price of $59 to just $39 in August. The offer will be valid from August 1st to August 31st.

Please note that the following restrictions apply:

• Full Licenses Only

  The discount only applies to full licenses. The pricing remains the same for upgrade licenses.

• Volume Discounts

  We are not offering volume discounts on full Cornerstone 2 licenses while this offer is valid. Volume discounts remain in effect for upgrade licenses.

• Other Discounts and Offers

  We are also not offering student or non-profit discounts on Cornerstone 2 licenses while this offer is valid. However, student and non-profit discounts are still available for upgrade licenses.

  Other offers valid during August 2011 are also limited to upgrade licenses.

It is our policy to support the current and previous versions of OS X in any given release. For example, Cornerstone versions 1.0-1.1 supported 10.4 Tiger & 10.5 Leopard, while 2.0-2.2 supported 10.5 Leopard & 10.6 Snow Leopard.

1.5 and 2.5 were exceptions to this rule. Both were released on the cusp of a new Mac OS X version and provided simultaneous support for three versions of OS X: 10.4-10.6 with 1.5 and 10.5-10.7 with 2.5.

We believe that this policy represents a good compromise between supporting older operating system versions and simultaneously allowing us to migrate to newer tools and keep Cornerstone up-to-date. Unfortunately, it can’t be achieved without leaving something behind.

So, now that 10.7 Lion is here we will be making the next step by dropping support for 10.5 Leopard in the next 2.x update. As a consequence, we will also be dropping support for Macs with PowerPC processors.

We believe that very few Cornerstone users will be impacted by this change. Currently less than 3% of visitors to zennaware.com are running 10.5 Leopard and we think this number will decrease very rapidly as 10.7 Lion is adopted (already almost 30% of visitors are running 10.7 Lion).

However, we do understand that some users will continue to need a version of Cornerstone that runs on 10.5 Leopard. For this reason we will be making 2.5.x available for download from the Cornerstone support page, in the same way as we do with 1.5.

We will continue to support Leopard with 2.5.x maintenance updates up until the release of the next 2.x update.

Future versions of Cornerstone will be Intel-only and will be better for it — removing the PowerPC code means smaller downloads and potentially faster launch times — but we can’t help feeling a little nostalgic.

Leaving the PowerPC behind marks the end of an era.

So long PPC. So long Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

We’re really exited to announce that Zennaware is sponsoring this year’s uDevGames contest.

There is a great selection of prizes available and the lucky winner will win a 5-user license for Cornerstone 2!

Other fantastic prizes include BBEdit and Yojimbo from Bare Bones, Reason from Propellerhead and OmniFocus and OmniGraffle from Omni Group.

What is uDevGames? In their own words:

The uDevGames contest is iDevGames’ unique grass-roots game creation contest, established in 2001 to encourage Macintosh game development, and to recognize the best and most innovative developers in the community.

We think it’s a great idea and are proud to be a part of it in our own small way.

Check out the uDevGames site for more information.