On my spare time, I usually work on my personal open source project called HareSVN. It’s a fairly ambitious project with the goal of becoming a portable, GUI Subversion client. For those who have heard of TortoiseSVN, it will follow the same design principle for the most part. You will be working out of a context menu to access most of the features and functionality. The big difference is that HareSVN will not be using shell integration. This can’t be done in a portable way since features vary between platforms.

Because shell integration will not be used, this means the program will come with its own file-browser. I aim to make it follow the same look-and-feel of Windows Explorer on Windows XP. However, the interface design for this has not been started. I’d post some mock ups if I could. However, the basic vision I have for it is that it will be very familiar to what you use already (Windows + TortoiseSVN).

I’ve always loved TortoiseSVN, and I think Stefan and his team has done (and continues to do) a great job on this piece of software. However, there are some architectural issues, such as portability, that cannot simply be added to TortoiseSVN and would require a full rewrite anyway. I’ve taken it upon myself to start a new project that will hopefully address some of the missing features I always wanted in TortoiseSVN.

Oh, and why did I name it HareSVN? Because when I hear “TortoiseSVN”, I think of the fairy tale “Tortoise and the Hare”. Yes, yes… I know the hare loses