It has helped productivity and I have increased my understanding of CVS generally from using it...
SmartCVS 7.1 concentrates on improved usability. It is a product-polishing release.
While writing the commit message, it often helps to see the local changes. If you haven't already open a Change Report before opening the Commit dialog, you now can show the local changes from the commit dialog.
Usually, projects not only consist of text files, but also binary files, e.g. graphics. Unfortunately, file compare tools for specific binary content are hard to find, but file viewers for these files are often very easy to find.
With SmartCVS you now can configure file viewers as file compare. Of course, there happens no automatic compare, but for a lot of file types, e.g. graphics, seeing both states on screen lets a human see differences easily.
For Mac OS X the system viewer for jpg, png and gif files is used.
If no file comparator is configured for files detected as binary, at least the file lengths and SHA hash codes are shown:
For the project window you now can configure the shown toolbar buttons.
You now can search and replace texts.
For the file compare, the synchronized scrolling for the left and right file content can be deactivated. There is a new option to ignore case changes.
You now can limit the shown transactions to periods defined by date or tags.
The shown transactions can be filtered by branch or author.
We improved SmartCVS at a lot more parts of the user interface like showing dates with "yesterday" or "today" where appropriate. Especially for OS X a lot of improvements were done: added a Reveal in Finder feature, unified toolbar, message and information dialogs.