It's not too surprising that Steve Jobs and his methods have been discussed  pretty extensively over the last few months. While reading one such article (viewable here), I came across a nice quote from a supposed exec who has previously worked for both Apple and Microsoft:

Microsoft tries to find pockets of unrealized revenue and then figures out what to make. Apple is just the opposite: It thinks of great products, then sells them. Prototypes and demos always come before spreadsheets.

The origin of the quote is really irrelevant; if more companies picked up this mantra, the world would surely be a much more awesome place.

As a self-confessed source control addict, I found it slightly irritating to say the least that there were no decent apps available which were capable of managing the projects I work on. While there are plenty available with the basic commit/push/pull/branch etc functionality, I couldn't find any decent programs which actually provided a way to track all of your repositories in one GUI, with most preferring to function on a repo-by-repo basis. While this isn't a huge problem, it just adds an extra unnecessary complication to what should be a simple task.

Enter Source Tree: my source control client of choice (works with git, Mercurial and SVN). In addition to being really pretty, it provides all of the functionality you'd expect to find from source control software: branch, tag, merge, rebase, resolve conflicts, stage/unstage files, create and apply patches, view 'blame' reports, view the history of a single file, stash - the list goes on.

Source Tree also integrates nicely with most of the popular diff/merge tools, and provides integration with GitHub, Bitbucket and Kiln hosting services.

Available for Mac OS X for free 

http://www.sourcetreeapp.com/

For any Linux users, the elementary team will no doubt be familiar, but for anyone that hasn't heard of it, elementary is a free (and open-source) software project with its main focus on bringing elegance and simplicity to the Linux operating system. Originally started in 2007, the elementary project now has several applications in its repertoire, as well as themes and icon sets for the gnome desktop.

It isn’t much of a surprise then, that the elementary team has made the decision to release its own distribution of the Linux operating system. Elementary OS uses the latest long-term release of the ever-popular Ubuntu as a base, with the team having essentially stripped out all of the superfluous programs and packages (you won’t see any of the games for example, or even a music player), and left only the bare essentials. The result is an incredibly lean OS which runs even faster than Ubuntu, which is by no means sluggish. What I like about this approach is that you really get a blank canvas; no bloat-ware or unnecessary apps to clog up your hard drive, leaving you to install what you need. You still get the standard Ubuntu Software Centre, so finding the apps you need is still a breeze.

In addition to the improved performance, the elementary OS is truly beautiful to look at; kind of a given considering the elementary team’s reputation for elegant user-interface design. It comes with all of the pretty elementary themes/icon sets pre-installed, as well as the custom ‘nautilus elementary’ file browser (a tweaked and streamlined version of the standard nautilus browser). Theming and icons are obviously very Mac inspired; lots of greys, industrial silvers and high contrast black symbols. Elementary OS also comes with the Mac-dock clone ‘Docky’ pre-installed. The whole feel of the UI is very much in keeping with the 'less is more' ideology; minimalistic, clean and uncluttered. Even the desktop has been locked down, so there are no icons cluttering up the desktop. It’s a similar story with the top panel (although both can be re-enabled easily using the gconf-editor if you so wish).

Overall, I’m very impressed with the elementary team’s first attempt, although I wouldn't have expected anything less with their high pedigree. It’ll be interesting to see what’s in store for the future as more of their apps reach public release.

If you want to try out elementary OS before installing, you can download the OS and create a live CD or USB over at: http://elementaryos.org/

Note: Faenza icon theme shown in images