Disappointing, slow, not thoughtful, but still useful

This app is close to being great. But then, the flaws are so huge, and so easy to fix, one wonders if the team that developed it has forgotten about it. As it is, it should be an embarassment to Black Pixel.

Please note the issues mentioned in my review are NOT fixed in version 2.1.

Here’s what’s wrong with the app.

When you diff two folders A and B, I believe it’s hashing every single file in folder A before it even checks whether the file exists in file B. If the file doesn’t even exist, no need to hash, yet the app must be doing SOMETHING during the many minutes, sometimes hours, it spends processing a folder with thousands of files that turns out to have no corresponding files in the other folder. This is an operation that should take a few seconds at the most if folder A has files and folder B doesn’t.

Sometimes, when running long folder diffs, it shows activity indicators. Sometimes, it doesn’t. It can go for hours with no activity indicator, then finally say after you sleep and wake up in the morning, show the results it was working on. OK, good that it eventually gets there, but the activity indicators should work.

Also the app does not always check the results of a merge often enough. This is hugely frustrating. You can make two folders match by copying files from one side to another, and then the app will sit there for half an hour or longer showing that the folders are still mismatched, when they arent. I suspect it’s going through the rehash of each and every file again, but it seems like there should be some more clever ways to do this that would be faster. Cache stuff in memory, intercept file writes to make sure you have a good list of changed files, then check only the changed files, not every file. If I change 1 file in a directory with 10,000 files you shouldn’t check every file again. If you run out of memory, write a bit of light weight metadata to disk.

The UI is not updated often enough in general. When files are being copied, it sometimes says ‘Copying…’ and sometimes doesn’t. It doesn’t shown any indication of which files are being copied, so if you have multiple tabs and come back to one where you’ve already started the copy, it doesn’t let you know that. You may try to copy again, and it will give you an error saying the file already exists at the destination. OK, well now that we’ve checked and seen it already exists, how about updating the UI to reflect that fact? Nope.

The indicator colors showing whether something is different are way too light. They look like shades of white, so you often have to adjust your screen angle to make sure you’re seeing the differences clearly.

Other than those things… well it’s still a useful app that lets you do folder and file diffs fairly easily. So if you need something like this, go for it, but be aware that it is a neglected, unloved app that will give you some frustration.

carloscuper about Kaleidoscope