Bruno Brito:
With Tower Workflows, we aim to provide you with the ability to create and customize your own branching workflows. You can use popular branching workflows as a starting point, tweak them, come up with your own unique solution from scratch, or embrace other popular workflows like the Stacked Pull Requests workflow.
For this to be possible, the Tower team focused on two big features for this release:
- Branch Dependencies.
- The “Restack Branch” action.
Version 12.0:
It allows Tower to keep track of the original branch from which another branch was created, a capability not natively supported by Git. Newly created branches in Tower automatically inherit their starting branch, and users can manually set or change the parent branch via the context menu at any time.
[…]
Tower enables you to create “stacks” of branches — branches that depend on other branches — and effortlessly restack them (using rebase) with a single action.
[…]
Repositories can now optionally be opened in a new window by passing the “-n” argument to the “gittower” command.
There’s more about stacked branches here.
Previously:
Developer Tool Git Git Tower Mac Mac App macOS 14 Sonoma Programming Version Control
Joe Rossignol:
Today marks the 15th anniversary of Apple releasing Mac OS X Snow Leopard, which became available to purchase for $29 on August 28, 2009.
After advertising Mac OS X Leopard as having “over 300 new features” in 2007, Apple previewed Snow Leopard at WWDC 2008. Notably, during that year’s “State of the Union” session, Apple showed a presentation slide that said the update had “0 new features,” as Apple opted to focus on under-the-hood performance and stability improvements.
Perhaps the more important anniversary is that of macOS 10.6.8 v1.1 on July 25, 2011. Yes, Snow Leopard didn’t really have any new user-facing features, but it had big changes the hood and was kind of a rough release at the outset. The Snow Leopard we remember fondly is the final version, released after almost two years of refinements.
Or, put another way, there were “no new features” between the initial releases of Leopard on October 26, 2007 and Lion on July 20, 2011.
Mario Guzmán:
Mac OS X Leopard/Snow Leopard appreciation post.
I never liked the capsule-style toolbar buttons in Mail, and iTunes didn’t yet use a standard table view, but otherwise I think the visuals in Snow Leopard have aged pretty well. We’ve gone from colored sidebar icons on a monochrome background to monochrome symbols on a busy, colored background.
Previously:
Update (2024-09-06): Adam Maxwell:
I still have my brown zippered hoodie from Customer Seeding for Snow Leopard testing. I miss the look and feel with color (except for the capsule toolbar controls), proper scrollbars, and ability to tell if a window is active.
Guy English:
Not to be too much of a party-pooper about Snow Leopard and it’s No New Features promise of a focus on reliability but—it came as iPhone OS 2.0 had just shipped, iPad was a year out, made major changes to the Finder, got all(?) system apps to be 64bit, and introduced GCD (Dispatch). So, you know, it was probably as heavy a lift, if not more so, than other macOS releases.
Basic Apple Guy:
Culturally, Snow Leopard is held in high regard as it represented a dramatic shift in priorities from features to foundation. It showed that Apple was willing to restrain itself from more consumer-facing flashy new features and instead strengthen its most crucial software.
To celebrate the 15-year anniversary of Snow Leopard, I’ve taken five of its most iconic wallpapers and upscaled them to fit beautifully on a 6K display.
Anniversary Apple Mail Apple Software Quality Bertrand Serlet Design History iTunes Mac Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard
Hartley Charlton:
After 13 years, Snapchat has finally rolled out an update that brings native app support to the iPad.
[…]
Until now, iPad users who wanted to use Snapchat had to run the iPhone version of the app, which was not optimized for the larger display, leaving it to run at a lower resolution with large surrounding black borders like other unoptimized apps.
William Gallagher:
The signup and login screens are still expanded iPhone ones and look very bare. Then when you're using it, you have no option but to hold your iPad in portrait mode — there is no landscape Snapchat at all.
Alex Heath:
Snapchat will soon start “experimenting” with placing sponsored messages next to chat threads from friends, according to CEO Evan Spiegel.
These “Sponsored Snaps” from brands will appear as unread messages in Snapchat’s main Chat tab, implying that they’ll sit above messages from a person’s contacts until they’re acted on. This is the first time Snap will show ads in the most used part of its app.
Previously:
Advertising iOS App iPadOS iPadOS 17 Snapchat
Shamino:
For those who are unaware, in macOS 11 (aka “Big Sur”), Apple changed all of the standard system sounds [names].
[…]
The interesting thing is that if you go to look for the actual sound files (in /System/Library/Sounds), you’ll find that the filenames are the same as the old names.
[…]
There is a application extension, /System/Library/ExtensionKit/Extensions/Sound.appex on my (macOS 14 "Sonoma") system. It is apparently a Quick Look plugin, but looking inside its package, I found a mapping table named AlertSounds.loctable. And this file is a binary property list file with a changed file extension. Dumping the contents of the file reveals the mapping. And not just one, but a big array of localized mappings[…]
“Basso” is now “Mezzo,” and “Sosumi” is now “Sonumi.” These are not just renamings; the sounds themselves are different, sometimes very different, as in “Purr” becoming “Pluck.”
I don’t really understand why they chose to maintain “compatibility” by changing the meanings of existing sound files, instead of adding the new sounds under new names (and perhaps hiding or deemphasizing the legacy ones, as they do with desktop pictures).
Previously:
Audio Localization Mac macOS 11.0 Big Sur System Preferences
