[RIRedinPA]

Hi,

I've been tasked with developing an app that allows our designers to collaborate on files (PSD, Illustrator, etc.). We do have VersionCue from Adobe but let's just say it is less than admired by the Art Department. So two part question:

1. Is there anything off the shelf that allows designers to collaborate on files. I've used The Google and am finding only document collaboration, project management type stuff like github. I'd rather not reinvent the wheel.

2. If the answer to 1 is "no soup for you" then, help me out with some crowd sourced brainstorming. I'd develop in XCode, primarily in Obj-C but with a smattering of AppleScript if I have to manipulate an app (like PS) though I would hope that a combo of the metadata and reading the file itself would do all the heavy lifting allow me to skip a third party.

Thanks

[mduell]

Does the version management need to be content aware (understand how to parse a PSD, recognize a layer was added) or can it treat every revision as a binary blob?

The usual tools for change management (git, Subversion, etc) are just going to treat PSDs as binary blobs. If that's OK you could do a wrapper for git or maybe use one of the existing Subversion GUIs for OS X (Versions, etc).

I don't know enough about the industry to know if there are content aware versioning tools for Adobe's products. Sadly my first/only guess would be Version Cue.