Earlier this week we took the dive and migrated all of our active projects (not all of these have been publicly announced much less released) from ProjectLocker Subversion to BitBucket Git. In the process we formulated a checklist of the steps needed in this migration process. We’ve decided to post that checklist as a guide for anyone else interested in migrating projects. Please note that this checklist is entirely independent of what services you use for Subversion and Git. Anything that is within “[]” is a variable that you have to replace with the appropriate value given your setup. We hope this checklist may save you some time searching for pieces of this process on various websites.

A. Setup

• Make sure that all changes are committed into the SVN repo from Xcode

B. Migration

1. cd to svn checkout (project) directory
2. svn log -q | awk -F ‘|’ ‘/^r/ {sub(“^ “, “”, $2); sub(” $”, “”, $2); print $2″ = “$2″ <"$2">“}’ | sort -u > authors-transform.txt
3. Edit the authors-transform.txt file to match desired Git user details
4. cd to home directory root (or any other place for the temporary Git repo)
5. mkdir temp_git_repo
6. cd temp_git_repo
7. git svn init [URL-TO-SVN-REPO] –no-metadata
8. git config svn.authorsfile [PATH-TO-AUTHORS-TRANSFORM-FILE]
9. git svn fetch

C. Push to Git Remote

1. git remote add origin [GIT-REMOTE-LOCATION]
2. git push -u origin master

D. Replace SVN Version of project on filesystem/in Xcode with Git Version

• This is self-explanatory and specific instructions for this can be found within Xcode and its documentation
• Essentially what is important to remember is that you use the “Checkout or Clone Repository” option in the Repositories organizer and paste in the same [GIT-REMOTE-LOCATION] used above
• You can also delete the temp_git_repo folder at this time along with the old SVN-backed project folder

You can get the update by simply checking for updates in WordPress if the plugin is already installed.

One reason for this is simply that one of the two people (myself, Alex Celeste) is a full-time college student during the academic year, so I don’t have the time to be constantly moving projects forward 365 days/year, and the other person (Eric Celeste) likewise has more important money-making endeavors to look after. Every couple of months an update to one piece of software or another may be sent out (like the unmentioned minor updates I released to Fact Triangles, Blackjack, and soeMatrix earlier this week), but again, these have been minor updates. The release notes of these products have over time hinted at some of what we’ve been busy with: Across the entire first semester of this past academic year I cooked up a massive collection of integrated backend tools that will help us support released software going forward, but naturally you don’t really see the tools reflected in your experience with Tenseg software, they just make our lives much easier.

However, it is summertime (as the heat wave currently engulfing Minnesota is proof of…) and so we both have had a little more time to devote to programming. I wanted to point out that summertime aside there are a couple projects that we’re working on that at some point may result in a piece of software you all can play with. For the most part these are projects we’d like to keep under wraps and first mention days (if not minutes) before public release, but I might as well mention the Sprouts app that I’ve been helping Eric put together as of late since he mentioned it on his personal blog.

If you are a Cocoa or Cocoa Touch developer yourself (if you don’t know what those two are just skip this paragraph ) then there is something we’ve started putting together that you may find useful. As you know, coding involves lots of research and experimentation. StackOverflow is a blessing for this, but we wanted to make sure we had a place to put our own tips and samples (even if mirrored from questions at StackOverflow). So, that was what gave birth to our new Developer Tips and Samples page. Regardless where else on the internet we share tips and sample code they will all be centrally accessible on that page here on our website. We anticipate that more tips and samples will be added to that page as we do our own coding. If any of the tips and samples on that page help you out we’d love to hear from you.

So in a nutshell… More progress is being made then you would see just by checking this news page and looking for updates in our software. The bulk of our (somewhat strained during the academic year) development time is given to currently unreleased software, most of which we aren’t mentioning publicly at this time. Therefore most progress these days is what we like to call “hidden progress” because we can see it easily enough, but none of you have a clue it is being made (without a post like this one).

• The copyright statement as visible in Finder is now updated for 2011
• The “Use Safari HomePage” button associated with the HomePage preference, which worked in testing v1.0.1 but broke I think with 10.6.6, is now working again
• You can no longer resize the About dialog

This update doesn’t make many changes, and the biggest one is entirely invisible, but the changes it makes are pretty significant. As always, questions and comments regarding WebPDF are welcome, just use the “Send Feedback…” menu item. WebPDF v1.0.2 is available either from the WebPDF Product Page, or for the next month using the self-updating functionality.

You may ask why create such a mechanism when we knew a Mac App Store was on the way (and is now open)? The basic answer is that the Mac App Store requires being part of another paid developers program and we didn’t want to commit to that at the moment. That, and since we develop more than just applications for Mac OS X we’d still need to deliver the widgets and random scripts from our website alone. If we ever decide to release shareware applications (versus just freeware applications) then the Mac App Store will be one of the more likely choices for distribution. Until then we’re going to be sticking with our own distribution mechanisms for our Mac applications.

Anyways, you can either use the built-in updaters or head on over to the product pages (Blackjack and soeMatrix) to get these minor updates. The old updater will remain in place for one month, then the self-updating functionality of the v1.5 updaters will be broken for eternity.