I’ve been have fun with a couple of new tools recently. I’m finding the Visual Studio 2012 RC nice and clean, and straightforward to use. Despite the massed wailings on the ‘net about its stylings – I actually like the look of it a lot. I even like the ALL CAPS MENU BAR. Many don’t, it seems, and for them there’s a handy
that’ll let you return to more familiar territory.
For some reason the grab bars at window tops bring memories of seeing Apple Mac desktops in Big K magazine, er, some years ago; it’s almost worth it just for that. The only wrinkle I really have is with context list menus – using a white highlight on grey means I need to take a moment to work out what’s selected if there’re only two options.
The second tool is GitHub for Windows. Nice simple Metro stylings – thankfully not in a painfully creative dark theme and the WORKFLOW – I’m habitually a command line Git user, so this is somthing of a revelation. It synchronizes seamlessly with GitHub, makes rollback and reversion a joy, eases diffing of modified files, allows easily selective commits, and more. For a currently one-man-show like me it’s pretty much perfect, although I imagine it’d work well in groups also – I’ve not tried any more advanced Git workflows with it.
Even if you don’t use Git, I’d say it’s worth a look.