A free alternative to Changes (for Mac OS X) and Beyond Compare (for Windows) is FileMerge for Mac OS X. It is a free utility that comes with Apple Developer Tools. FileMerge can be launched in the Terminal (command line) by typing opendiff dir1 dir2 FileMerge differs from many comparsion utilities because it doesn’t show…
When upgrading web applications it can make life much easier to get a list of files that have changed since the last version. This way you only have to overwrite a small number of files so if you won’t have to make all of your customizations again. The best application to use on Windows to do this is WinDiff. WinDiff is a very lightweight application that does not require installation to run. Below are some screenshots of WinDiff, where to download WinDiff, and instructions on how to compare two directories of like files.
A great tool for web site owners is to be able to rank your web traffic and estimate the reach of your web site to the world. A tool I have used forever is Alexa (alexa.com) which will allow you to compare your site to others sites and see various other statistics about any site type in the search box. I have been searching around for some comparable sites to Alexa so I can have multiple perspectives of the estimated reach of some of my sites.
Below is an example of Alexa comparing the traffic rank of cnn.com and microsoft.com.
There are numerous way to compare, modify, etc. two like files on Windows however using the application WinMerge will make things much easier. In the past I have opened the two files in Notepad or Notepad++, compared them, and then made the necessary changes. WinMerge is open source and created specifically for comparing similar files. There are so many benefits to using WinMerge including the ability to compare like folders (and their contents), save both files as projects, visually see location in files during the process, easily merge files, and many more. Below is a screenshot of what WinMerge looks like when comparing two PHP files.
