I usually try to be positive but these changes don't look good. It looks like some overzealous designer started making UX decisions they weren't qualified to make and now the app is unusable.
I'm a huge SourceTree fan - I use it exclusively for Git, but I won't be upgrading until these obvious UX problems have been addressed.
Edit: Also, why do the OS X and Windows versions look so different?!? The buttons aren't even in the same places!
Edit 2: I don't like how negative I was in my initial post. I'm going to give it a try, maybe I'll be surprised.
Edit 3: So I just opened it up.. I think the spacing has been improved substantially. Individual components feel more polished, certainly. The biggest problem though is that the entire app feels like it's defocused because it's all grey. The only colour in the entire application comes from the pale blue used to colour the folders. Pretty lame. The whole UI just feels very drab now. Other than the lack of colour though, it looks better.
Also, why do the OS X and Windows versions look so different?!? The buttons aren't even in the same places!
Different platforms have different conventions and guidelines. Having both versions look and act the same will make it alien on either or both platforms.
I don't know about that in this case. Take a look at the collapsable menu on the left for OS X and Windows - one has icons and one doesn't. The icons at the top are ordered completely differently by the looks of it. That's not a convention. The real alienation they should worry about is alienating their own users when they're on different platforms. The program should feel familiar regardless.
I'm personally staying in version 2.0 [1]. I use SourceTree exclusively for reading the commit log and exploring the branches in a repo, and all these graphical changes just make it harder to read (no color coded rows, more subtle colors...). It just seems more "artsy", not more usable.
> It looks like some overzealous designer started making UX decisions they weren't qualified to make and now the app is unusable.
At least they tried.
I used the previous iteration (Windows) for all of 5 minutes before deciding that the cognitive load which that awful UI caused wasn't worth it. I switched back to CLI+GHFW until Git Kraken[1] entered beta and, well, I no longer see any reason to reconsider my GUI client. Still, that incompetent UX was one of the biggest problems on Windows. Kudos to them for revisiting it.
For the half day that I used the new version before realising it was too broken I noticed that the UX hasn't really changed; the UI has though, i.e. most of the changes are purely cosmetic.
I was a bit suspicious when I read the email they sent, mentioning a new team:
"We've put a brand new team in place. We’re firing on all cylinders and are hard at work resolving your biggest pain points. Update to the latest SourceTree to get all the awesomeness."
> With the new versions of SourceTree, you’ll be prompted to review and accept Atlassian’s Customer Agreement and Privacy Policy. To ensure that it is really you that’s accepting these changes, we’re prompting every user to enter their existing Atlassian account credentials or create an Atlassian account.
This smells like BS to me. 99% of all installable apps with EULAs including from big companies like Microsoft, Apple, and Adobe don't require you to login to accept the EULA.
If you want people to log in, then sell them on the great features they get, don't lie to them.
Thanks for the feedback. Sure, there are other ways to accept EULAs, but we chose Atlassian Account since it will enable us to integrate other services like Bitbucket and JIRA more seamlessly with SourceTree in the future.
Unfortunately we can't talk about those great features at this stage since they don't exist.
When you first install Sourcetree (and every year thereafter) you have to register it with an email address. Is this just that or is it different? (ie. have they started requiring an always-on connection to Atlassian or something?)
You already had to register with an email address after 30 days to continue to use SourceTree. Now we are asking you to register upfront after you download the latest release of SourceTree.
I don't mind SourceTree; it's a great tool to visualize git tree that scratches some itches that gitk doesn't quite. Tree visualization of multiple branches and seamless integration with github/bitbucket are the reason I keep it on my Windows machine.
Granted, most of actual git activities are better done via command line, except for chunk editing.
The recent SourceTree release was dire, aside from the UI changes, it was just broken in too many places. This happens, but what really got my goat was the original tweet in this thread, https://twitter.com/cody_watkins/status/700023288085372928.
It wasn't a beta version, it was a main release and the quality was too poor for them to admit it. This is just sleazy PR.
The quality was poor even if you could get it to work; signing into Bitbucket (also by Atlassian) repeatedly crashed the app for me, which wouldn't have been a problem if it didn't automatically attempt to (and then hang) every time I opened it.
Hey David - it was a mistake on our side. Said that we're planning a new beta release process for our upcoming SourceTree releases and we’ll share more in a blog post in the coming days.
I've been using SourceTree for years. It was always a little funky in how it was laid out but I got used to it.
I could have lived with this change if they didn't get rid of freaking COLORS. Seriously. All the icons look more or less the same now. Have to read to make sure I'm clicking what I think I'm clicking.
I think I'll look elsewhere finally. I just can't stand another 50 shades of gray interface.
Side topic here: Anyone noticed how bad Git-LFS is?
We've been using it in production for dataset versioning and noticed that it's not even at a beta stage, perhaps pre-alpha.
It gets corrupted by it's own volition at random, working seamlessly for a day then suddenly 'git clone' will fail repeatedly, until the repository is rolled back, or it magically fixes itself.
I don't understand how it got integrated into Github, and now i see sourcetree and other clients support it. gah.
Most of the time it'll say "TLS handshake timeout" in the logs, so I just wait for githubs amazon instances to come back online. Other times its something I committed that others can't pull, so I'll revert then re-commit. A divining stick is recommended.
I had to revert back to the old version with "ugly" icons as soon as I've got the new update since the new UI is so terrible and hard to look at. Not to mention it keeps on crashing.
In my opinion a huge strategic error not to write a cross-platform app. Now they have two separate code bases (Mac and Windows) and still no Linux support ever likely. Since I use Linux, like many other developers, this app isn't an option.
I don't get why Atlassian have a source tree blog if they're not going to engage with their users. Last I checked there are 66 horribly critical comments. And no-one from Atlassian have engaged at all.
Yeah, it got bad shockingly fast. Question though: does anyone really use SourceTree? I've tried using it like 5 different times and it's just so convoluted. It's very ugly, non-intuitive, and doesn't have a lot of features that people use with Git.
On Windows I usually grab Tortoise, and on Mac I use Tower. Tower has some limitations and it gets crashy every now and then, but geez they make using a UI worth it. I genuinely got as good as I am with Git on the command line because SourceTree was so effing bad and I didn't have rights to install something different on a laptop I was using for a week.
I've been using it for the last two years, since our team switched to Git. I like being able to scroll through the commits list, and the ability to easily add hunks or even individual lines by clicking is a vast improvement over `git add -p`. Also Sourcetree has a UI for doing interactive rebasing, which is GREAT for the same reason.
The biggest downside for me is the inability to easily browse the state of a repo at a given commit, like I could with TortoiseHG. I keep around GitExtensions for some of that history browsing. Also, the security software installed on my work machine insists on inspecting new processes for validation, which unfortunately doesn't play well with ST spawning multiple git.exe process trees. Always pegs my CPU and slows things down. Performance is reasonable on other machines, though.
Overall, I find it a useful and valuable tool. I just wish they'd make real improvements instead of this "replace a perfectly acceptable UI with a bunch of unreadable gray lines" nonsense they just pulled. I'm sticking with 1.6.25.
I use it daily, for work and personal projects. Mainly like the fact that I can instantly see the changes in files and unstage/stage only the relevant changes for the commit. I sometimes keep temp code around for weeks without issues because I can easily just _not_ commit it.
I got a blank screen every time the wizard prompted me to accept the EULA after the upgrade, so the app became unusable to me. Fortunately the 2.1 installer is available at http://downloads.atlassian.com/software/sourcetree/SourceTre... and after installing that I could get straight back to work. Even though they say they've have fixed this issue since I'm not very keen on upgrading anytime soon tbh.
Not true, it's riddled with bugs. Here's just the ones I've noticed today:
- Install and start it on Windows 10 and the initial Atlassian login screen doesn't work (it pops a browser window over the top that doesn't go anywhere). It eventually works after 3 or 4 tries.
- Upgrade from an older version on a machine where some of the repos in the left hand pane have been removed and it crashes instantly on first run with null reference exceptions.
- Space as a shortcut to add a file to staging is gone.
- Right click on the menu heading "Branches" in the middle panel and it will let you try to check out a branch named "Branches"
- If you had the setting on to show full console output (I like to see the output of the post-receive hook) it now shows the dialog for every file you add to staging.
Atlassian is currently hellbent on getting all their products "integrated" from an account perspective -- so they can "provide a better experience", which likely translates to "will require monthly subscriptions everywhere".
Learn how to use the Git command line. You will never regret it. In the past, I could only use git using Git Tower, but when I was forced to use the command line, I never went back. The level of granularity is fantastic. Also you won't look ridiculously incompetent when you're pair programming with a co-worker and they don't have the SourceTree/Kraken/Tower/etc.
Command line prowess is not the be all and end all of competency. Some people like to have less of an overhead in brain cycles when doing menial/repetitive tasks (like dealing with source control) so that they can actually get on with real work.
Personally, I think git is overcomplicated. Powerful, yes, but still ridiculously complicated, but that's the price you pay for all that power and flexibility. If a GUI can make many of the simple tasks easier and quicker then I'll always opt for that; I'll drop down to the command line when I need to deal with more complicated scenarios.
Funnily, I've been using the command line for git and never used sourcetree. When colleagues started using SourceTree I could not figure how to drop the changes from the graphical interface, felt kind of silly.
We’re planning a new beta release process for our upcoming SourceTree releases and we’ll share more in a blog post in the coming days. This will allow the community to engage with the SourceTree team and provide extensive feedback on future updates. Thanks for all your feedback.
I was using the new version for about a week now and besides some bugs I really don't like the new design. After working with SourceTree for 2 years it feels like I have to learn a new application.
I'm now checking out GitKraken which looks quite promising after the first hours of working with it.
On Windows version big repositories are now noticeably faster than with the old version, which makes this feel like an improvement despite its glaring flaws, like the hassle for the mandatory registration with a bogus mailinator email-address, or the brand new UI bugs.
I don't know why they have not pulled the new version yet.. apart from the login issue that blocked most people from using the app, there are so many regressions and new bugs it is unusable.
I'm surprised to see such a big misstep from Atlassian.
* Clicking on unstaged/staged files changes the diff view but the highlight on the file works on only half of the files, seems to be random when it works and doesn't work
* Highlight to show which branch is selected is gone (History is selected by default and highlighted, when you click out highlight is gone forever)
* UI flickers, is about 2x as slow as previous version
Don't mean to pick apart a free product, but this is a tool we have been using for years and to have a pushed update regress things this much is a surprise.
I updated to 1.8.* (Windows) last week when the app notified me of the new version and found it hugely unstable. I've since downgraded back to 1.7.0 and will be continuing to use that until I have a real need to upgrade.
It's a huge shame that SourceTree isn't open source. I'd love to lend my WPF expertise to the project; it seems whoever's working on the Windows version is a bit clueless.
Just upgraded to 1.8.2.3 - still can't stage multiple files at once like I used to be able to in 1.7.x; i.e. select multiple files and hit space. Also, there's no backup context menu option for this?
Sad about this - just had two long-time friends complain bitterly about it - one moved to Github Desktop, the other downgraded. Used to use it myself on one machine until I started using VS Code (which has a simple and effective Git workflow).
Still waiting for showing all repositories on the left hand side so I don't need to iterate through ten different windows whenever I'm looking to commit something.
Edit: Some commenters mentioned SmartGit and GitKraken. Anyone here actually use them?
I use SmartGit every day and like it very much. I'd be happy to answer any questions about it - except for a direct comparison with SourceTree, since I haven't used the latter.
WRT your "still waiting", SmartGit does list all your repos in one panel in the main window, and you can select any of them to work on without switching windows. When you view the log for a repo it opens in a new window, but you can do most work directly in the main window.
One thing about SmartGit is it's definitely not a "dumbed down" GUI - for most of what I do it feels more powerful than the Git command line, not less.
SmartGit is a commercial product if you use it for commercial work (it does have a 30 day trial), or free for noncommercial work.
So far my main complaints are the layout in windowed mode (had to pull a few of the panels to make staged/unstaged come out from behind the commit input) and not being able to switch off the Identicons (Getting a rather garish red and green one that's distracting)
In Windows drag & drop for staging files is gone completely.
Happy to see now my stashed content in the small sidebar after the remotes.
Overall the release isn't that bad in my opinion.
The only reason I use SourceTree is for its Mercurial support. It has always been very slow, but at least it was actively maintained, unlike the other Mercurial GUI apps I've tested.
I'm a huge SourceTree fan - I use it exclusively for Git, but I won't be upgrading until these obvious UX problems have been addressed.
Edit: Also, why do the OS X and Windows versions look so different?!? The buttons aren't even in the same places!
Edit 2: I don't like how negative I was in my initial post. I'm going to give it a try, maybe I'll be surprised.
Edit 3: So I just opened it up.. I think the spacing has been improved substantially. Individual components feel more polished, certainly. The biggest problem though is that the entire app feels like it's defocused because it's all grey. The only colour in the entire application comes from the pale blue used to colour the folders. Pretty lame. The whole UI just feels very drab now. Other than the lack of colour though, it looks better.