The best Subversion client for the Mac by far is now out of beta, and it continues to rock. And at only €39 per licence, the price is right too.

If you use Subversion as your source control and versioning, then on a Windows box you will no doubt be aware that TortoiseSVN is the best SVN client out there for your PC. I personally also use VisualSVN for its Visual Studio 2008 integration which makes life so easy when developing in the IDE, and the free VisualSVN Server taking care of the backend business.

But on a Mac the toolkit has been far from clear cut until recently. There have been numerous SVN client tools around for a while, but most of them sucked in some way or another – mostly as they were so unmac-like. Then all of a sudden Versions came around the corner and filled the empty SVN client gap nicely.

Actually about the same time Cornerstone came along as well, which looks great too, but just doesn’t flow as well as Versions for me, and it was a whole load slower. It is also a tad more expensive (but not by much to be fair). You might prefer it over Versions, but it’s not for me.

Couple the arrival of Versions with the release of Coda 1.6, which also has SVN support built in and developing on a Mac has never been better.

Versions. Get yourself a copy today http://www.versionsapp.com/

All of a sudden yesterday my MacBook decided it needed to spin the fan up to such a speed that I thought it was trying to take off. Not only did this seem a little strange, but it was also darn noisy and annoying.

I tried all the usual, like giving it a reboot and even reseting the power management controller, but as soon as it booted back up, the fan kicked back off again like Airwolf in a hurry.

Using iStat Pro I could see that the processor was running fairly warm, and the fan was booting around at close to 7000rpm – not normal.

Now, I’m running 10.5.5, which I have been for some time now with no problems, and it struck me as an odd thing to suddenly occur, so I checked over the processes to see what was kicking off.

Ordering the processes by CPU usage it was clear we had a winner – ATSServer. So here’s the obvious question, what the hell does that do, and why was it doing it quite so much?

A quick consultation with the Oracle told me the ATSServer, part of Mac OS X 10.5, is “a system daemon which provides font management and processing”. OK, but why is it working so hard?

Well apparently the ATSServer also plays a part in the Spotlight indexing, particularly when it’s indexing PDFs. Bamm! Hang on a minute, I’ve just added nearly 3GB of PDF files to my local disk, could this be the problem?

Another browse around the interweb and it seems the world is littered with people whose ATSServer process is causing havoc because of a big pile of PDFs. The long and short of it is that Spotlight was trying to index the contents of the PDF files and because there were so many of them it was causing the process to go mental.

There are two solutions to this problem. 1) leave it be, and if your Mac doesn’t take off, eventually it will finish indexing the files and it will return to normality, or 2) open the Spotlight preferences and add the directory with the PDF files in to the privacy list, meaning they will not be indexed. I opted for the later, and within a minute the fan had stopped. Magic.

A big shout has to go out to Martijn Bleeker who highlighted this very issue on his blog yonks ago, and which I stumbled upon today.