Kaleidoscope

There's a lot of goodness in this app. It's visually clean, mac-like, and fluid. And yet, it drives me crazy. I haven't had problems with crashes, but writing the developer with basic questions is like tossing stuff into a black hole. And there's just no transparency on support for key features. All my developer tools have long since supported dark mode. But ask the developer when this will be released for Kaleidescope, and… crickets.

Looks great ... absolutely, continually failed for me.

If you’re looking for a $70 application that will show you that there are differences between two folders, this will work. If you actually want to drill down to see what the specific files are causing the differences, you’re out of luck. The app crashes every single time I go into a folder to compare actual files. Every. Single. Time. This would be acceptable for a $10 app, but $70??? It’s ludicrous.

I justy downloaded to compare and copy between folders on Mac OS Catalina. Crashes literally in a few seconds of comparing folder contents!

Lots of crashes and can't handle large directories. It's interface is beautiful... if only it worked.

- Updated September 10, 2018 and slightly revised June 12, 2019 - (still 1 star) After a few years of being completely abandoned, Black Pixel had started releasing updates to Kaleidoscope again. Some of the longstanding bugs were fixed and the app was technically updated for newer versions of macOS, but many new bugs were introduced in the process and the app was actually made measurably worse in some ways. At this point, it has been nearly a year since the last update and Kaleidoscope is still in miserable condition. I've reported many bugs, but Black Pixel doesn't respond. I and many other people frequently see directory and file comparisons flipping sides for no reason and there's no indication that it has happened, so you have to check tab names and hove the mouse over parts of the path to identify which version is on each side. Sometimes files and folders will be marked as changed when all of the subfolders and files are identical. Opening comparisons often loses keyboard focus so arrow keys and other actions don't work at all. Performance is still pretty crumby, even on a brand new MacBook Pro. There's more, but at this point, I'm not sure it's even worth writing out because Black Pixel doesn't appear to be interested in fixing Kaleidoscope. The company makes its money through contracting work, and judging from the release notes and reviews for its other apps, very little effort is going into maintaining their public-facing apps. - Update (1 star) - Kaleidoscope is completely unusable on El Capitan, and was already doing really badly on previous versions of OS X. It frequently fails to load up folder and file comparisons, and even when it is working, it often stops comparing and has to be completely restarted to get it working again. Folder comparisons sometimes show that files and folders have changes, then when opening them up there aren’t any differences. It’s horrendously bad and really shouldn’t be for sale anymore. There’s no way Apple would have authorized this app if it had to pass through a review today. It hasn’t been updated in 18 months, despite massive bugs. At this point, you’d have to be insane to spend money on this app. - Previous Review (2 stars) - I continue to be disappointed by Kaleidoscope. In general, it's only so-so as a diff tool. There are a number of things it mislabels as additions or modifications, and it's not great at separating groups of changes like it claims to. The bigger issue here is that it only offers a raw diff, so it's mostly useless for comparing two XML files that may have changed spacing and formating, but contain similar content. One of the biggest problems is performance and lack of decent multi-threading. Whenever I compare large folders of a few hundred files each, the app freezes up for a very long time. Not only does it lock up the window loading these folders, but every window, regardless of what they are comparing. There are also a lot of basic usability issues, especially regarding keyboard shortcuts and basic operations, that don't work correctly. I've reported many of the issues and bugs I've seen to the developers, including screenshots, videos, and assorted other samples, but a lot of it has been dismissed as issues they're not interested in fixing. After 6 months without an update or even a simple bug fix, I've got a feeling they've abandoned the app but don't want to stop making sales. I would strongly recommend staying away from Kaleidoscope, even if a new version finally comes out.

Kaleidoscope has proved to be a costly, useless app. Crashes constantly doing the simplest compares. I have not been able to find any useful documentation, but there doesn't seem to be any way to exclude particular file types in compares. Trying to compare photo directories (with a few dozen photos) almost always hangs. Very disappointing.

Love the app and its design, except it randomly crashes within a minute after I compare two different folders and drill down a few times. Very frustrating. The app hasn’t been updated in a year. Please fix this. I have to keep reopening the app over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over…………………

I love the idea of this app and UI/UX design but sadly the app crashes too often & everytime you press copy and try to actually run the task. So I now just use it as a visual checker and manually transfer on Finder which then it really makes this app not worth the money. I’m still willing to wait and give it a chance but you MUST work on the backend to fix these crashes and review the crash reports plz. One thing i would like added is a progress bar or a Que to see that status of individual tasks or all tasks. PLEASE fix the crashing issues. Working on an iMac Pro just FYI if that helps.

It’s a pretty useful tool for merging, which is my main use. It now can handle fairly large .xcodeproj files, something it’s struggled with in the past.