On the whole, Tower is the right choice for your Mac if your are using the Git system to version control the development of your applications. The Tower utility comes with a well organized user interface, features a streamlined workflow, and enables you to perform various tasks with a simple mouse click. Mac Pro is the most secure tower we’ve ever built. A Secure Enclave coprocessor provides the foundation for encrypted storage and secure boot capabilities. So you can worry less about protecting your work, code, and intellectual property. And focus more on doing your best thinking.
We published 15 releases since then - adding new features, improving existing ones, and increasing Tower's performance. Here's a quick roundup of some of these powerful new features and improvements.
Performance Tuning
Being a native macOS application from day one, Tower had always been pretty good in terms of performance and stability. But 'pretty good' never cut it for us... which is why we decided to invest heavily in getting more power out of Tower.
Especially bigger Git repositories with thousands of remote branches, tags, etc. now benefit significantly from our work in this area: opening such a repository, displaying the working copy, loading changesets, and many other actions are up to 5x faster than before!
We will never stop to fine-tune and improve performance. But in its current state, Tower is a very powerful and responsive macOS application.
User Profiles
Many developers maintain multiple identities. Before your imagination starts to run wild: I'm talking about different committer identities and email addresses 😉 One profile for work, another one for side projects, and maybe yet another one for an OpenSource project...
To make maintaining and switching these identities easier, we introduced User Profiles in version 3.4. Since then, a new tab in Tower's preferences dialog lets you create and edit profiles. These can be used to quickly switch between different committer identities - just for a single commit or generally for a certain repository.
GPG Support
Support for GPG had been on our wishlist for quite some time. But if you know our philosophy a bit, you also know that we're careful not to rush things: instead of releasing something half-baked, we invest the time and effort to ship something great.
With version 3.5, we were finally able to present a seamless, thought-out integration in Tower. You can now sign commits and tags, see which commits have been signed and by who, and connect GPG keys with your User Profiles - all right from within the app.
If you're using it in your work, you'll want to read more about the GPG integration in Tower in our help.
Dark Mode
When Apple announced the introduction of a 'Dark Mode' in macOS 10.14, we knew we wanted to have this in Tower as soon as possible. And the countless Tweets and emails from users let us know we were on the right track. 💌
This is why, as soon as macOS Mojave was out, Tower was available in a brand-new dark theme. And it really looks awesome!
Image Diffing
Version control with Git has become more and more popular among designers (and design-conscious developers, of course). That's why we wanted to make working with visual assets in Git repositories easier and more rewarding.
Since version 3.1, Tower supports image diffs for a variety of formats (PNG, JPG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, JPEG2000, HEIC). This functionality is available both in the Working Copy and in our various history / changeset views. Although the current state of this feature is already great, we have lots of ideas to extend and improve this in the future.
Undo with CMD+Z
And finally, with version 4 of Tower for Mac, we've reached another huge milestone in our mission to make version control with Git easier and more productive for everyone. Why, you ask? Because undoing mistakes in your daily work has now become as easy as pressing CMD+Z!
One of the best things about Git has always been that it offers so many ways to undo mistakes. But depending on what exactly you want to undo, this might involve a series of quite complex commands - and thereby the risk of doing more damage than repair...
Tower 4 for Mac finally unlocks this huge potential: no matter if you're trying to undo the catastrophic effects of a mind-bending interactive rebase or simply the deletion of a branch - it's all available with a simple keyboard shortcut we all know and love.
Here are some of the many scenarios where you can use this:
- Undo deleting a branch or tag
- Undo merging two branches
- Undo checking out a branch
- Undo deleting files
- Undo committing changes
- Undo a rebase (or an interactive rebase)
- Undo publishing a branch on a remote
- Undo staging/unstaging changes
- ...and much more!
Apple Mac Pro 2019
In other words: averting disaster is now as easy as undoing a change in your text editor with CMD+Z.
Standing on the Shoulders of a Giant 3.0
When we talk about recent feature additions and improvements, we should be careful not to forget one thing: the great foundation that the launch of version 3.0 brought us. Interactive Rebase, Quick Actions, Pull Requests, Reflog, Navigation and countless other features and improvements paved the way for a whole new Tower app.
Thanks to all of our users for joining us on this journey. If you haven't already, make sure to update your Tower app to version 4 - and have fun undoing mistakes!
Pull Request Support for Azure DevOps and Azure DevOps Server
Tower For Mac
Pull Requests are an important communications tool for dev teams. While Tower offers support for Pull Requests from GitHub, Gitlab, and Bitbucket for some time now, we are excited to add Pull Request support for Azure DevOps with version 4.4 on Mac and version 2.5 on Windows.
The features we offered for GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket are now also possible for Azure DevOps:
- create pull requests
- view pull request conversations, commits, and changesets
- check out pull requests (currently only on macOS)
- close conflicts
- edit pull requests
Due to a shortcoming of the Azure DevOps API, however, comments on Azure DevOps Pull Requests are currently read-only.
If you would like to learn more about working with Pull Requests in Tower, our help documentation is a great place to get started.
Tower for Mac
On macOS, we also published version 4.5 which comes with a range of nice improvements:
- Merge with
--no-commit: In Tower's 'merge' dialog, you will now find a new checkbox named 'Directly Commit Merged Changes.' This means that we now support the—-no commitoption, which allows you to apply merged changes to the Working Copy instead of directly committing them. - Delete Tracked Branch: When deleting a local branch, you can now choose to also have its remote counterpart (the 'tracked' branch) deleted in one go. This can save you from hunting down the remote branch or from forgetting to clean it up altogether.
- Exclude Folders from Search: You can now also specify directories which Tower should exclude when searching for repositories. You can find this in Tower’s Preferences on the 'Advanced' tab.
- Improved Sorting in Dialogs: The sorting in dialogs received an upgrade as well. Remotes are now being sorted by relevance.
If you want to learn more, check out the full release notes for Tower for Mac on our website.
Tower for Windows
Besides our Azure DevOps release, Tower’s Windows version received another upgrade with version 2.6. This version brings some super-handy features from the Mac version to Windows.
- First Parent Filtering: We introduced this to the Mac version earlier this year and it's now available on Windows as well: in a nutshell, this feature allows you to hide merge commits in the history view through filtering by first parent. It’s easily accessible and Tower’s Mac users already love it!
Mac Pro Tower
- Gender-Neutral Avatars: We are also introducing gender-neutral avatars to the Windows version. If no avatar image can be loaded, Tower uses your initials instead of a placeholder image.
- Copy Ref Names: Further improvements include the possibility to easily copy the names of branches, tags, and remote branches in the sidebar. There, you can now also check out tags by simply double-clicking them.
If you want to learn more, check out the full release notes for Tower for Windows on our website.
New Major Versions Coming Up
Apart from these 4 recent releases, we are already working on two new major versions for Mac and Windows. For a sneak peek of what's to come, read our blog post 'Coming Up on the Roadmap'.
If you already have a Tower account, make sure to update Tower to the latest version for free. And if you're not a Tower user yet, then download our 30-day free trial and take it for a spin!
Tower For Macbook Pro
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