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Why Designers Need Subversion!

So for the entire weekend, I’ve been pondering one simple fact. Something that’s been bugging me for a long time and that my girlfriend Katrina and my roommate Elizabeth would find utterly humorous. Something that as I get older, seems to become more a part of my day-to-day life.

Ok, the fact is I can’t remember everything! Ok, there I said it. I admitted it.

Now, if you’re a true blue code jockey, you already know what I’m about to say. Ok, hang in there Chucky baby, this is gonna get good!

Let me explain. I personally own 3 computers, a Mac Pro, a MacBook Pro and a Modbook (oh yeah baby!). When I’m working, I use my machines for different things and they serve a purpose at diffent points during my projects (and that doesn’t include the iMac I have at the office). One of my biggest challenges these days is making sure that I keep track of what I’m working on as I move from machine to machine in this ceremonial dance I call work. One slip up and I’ve lost hours of work because I forgot to transfer the right files from one machine to the other.

Add to that the fact that I can collaborate with other designers/developers during a project and you have the fixin’s for a nasty project management stew.

So, what’s the solution? That’s right sparky, subversion (you probably cheated and looked at the title of this post).

Subversion is one of the leading Verson Control Systems in the world today, maybe the universe. It is essentially a tool to allow you to keep a centralized repository of computer files that you would use for a particular project. It supports the notion of versioning which is way of backing up your work and keeping track of each version of a project file you might be working on.

Subversion is great for collaborating as well. Members of your project team can “check out” a copy of the project files and can submit changes to those files. Subversion manages those edits and keeps a copy of all the old versions of your files.

When a teammate on your project “checks in” a file to submit the changes they made to the central repository, they are required to add comments about what kinds of changes they made to the file. This feature is probably one of the most useful in a team environment. You can scan through the history of a file and see what changes were made to a particular file (as long as your teammates weren’t lazy and labeled everything as “oh, was just fixing this before lunch at Taco Pete’s”).

Another valuable feature of subversion is the idea of branching projects. Say you’ve finished up an identity package for a client of yours and now you’re ready to work on a package for one of their subsidiaries. That project will probably start as an offshoot of the first project with some additions and changes to produce the second package. In subversion you can create a new “branch” for the new project and carry over all or some of the files from the original project and they are both treated as independent projects. You can merge the branch back into the main project (called the trunk) if you wanted to consolidate the files for both projects.

See, you need it. You want it! You gotta have this! Right? Good!

Ok, let’s start off with the good news: Subversion is free. Yes! Open source goodness can be found here. You can download the main command line interface from the Subversion site. There are a number of graphical subversion apps around for both Windows and Mac. The best of the bunch for Windows is TortoiseSVN. It’s a great piece of software that integrates nicely with Windows Explorer. On the Mac site, I currently use ZigVersion. It has a very mac-like interface and makes it easy to use subversion on the Mac. One that’s been getting a lot of press lately is Versions with a beautiful interface that makes using subversion feel natural on a Mac.

Now for the bad news. Only a handful of web hosts will allow you to setup a subversion repository. It seems really hard to find on your basic web hosting account. One host that does support Subversion is Dreamhost.com where you are allowed to build subversion repositories using your hosting account space.

A completely online solution I came across this weekend is called Beanstalk which specializes “Hassle Free Subversion Hosting.” It is a total online solution for keeping track of your subversoin repositories. You can sign up for a free account that gives you 20MB of storage for your files. Their paid accounts come with a 30-day free trial period.

Another cool feature according to their website is the integration with Twitter, BaseCamp (an online project management tool) and Lighthouse (an online issue tracking system). Everything you need to manage your projects from start to support. Did you hear that Sparky?

Here’s the deal. If you’re a professional coder, you’re probably using some sort of version control system, you know the warm, happy feeling you get when you commit your code to the trunk. Boy, that’s happy.

If you’re a designer or anyone that generates a lot of files during your day-to-day work, then you need to start using subversion. There’s a certain sense of freedom to be had when you don’t have to worry where the latest and greatest project files. Now that’s cool.