GitHub's on your phone

https://github.com/blog/1559-github-s-on-your-phone

by oBeLx • 13 years ago

279 81 13 years ago

dsyph3r• 13 years ago

This is by far one of the best updates GitHub has made recently. Using the current GitHub on a mobile device is difficult and slow. Really pleased to see this done!

Spiritus2• 13 years ago

Hmm, they forgot the news feed. Or have I gone blind?

thinker• 13 years ago

Looks like Github used Angular.js. Would be interesting to hear how they settled on that. I've been using it for a side project and so far have had a positive experience.

uptown• 13 years ago

Pretty sure they use PJAX.

1qaz2wsx3edc• 13 years ago

I don't think they are. It's really minimalistic. Just Zepto & a small bit of scripting for the navbar.

diggan2• 13 years ago

Zepto I think. Can't tell if it's only the Zepto code but have a look on it here: https://gist.github.com/VictorBjelkholm/6003702

cleverjake2• 13 years ago

I don't see any sign of angular - what makes you think that they did?

gnufied• 13 years ago

Yes, definitely not angural.js. It would be still interesting to see their mobile webapp stack.

jbrooksuk• 13 years ago

WOOOOOO! This has been driving me insane. Trying to read issues and repositories, and I'm there pinching and panning around getting lost and frustrated. Thank you GitHub <3

llambda• 13 years ago

I'm not sure what took GitHub so long to _finally_ implement a mobile view for the site, but thank you. I have been waiting for this to happen for years, quite literally.

Edit: It's worth noting I've heard plenty of counter arguments to using GitHub from my phone. But I will say, sometimes I want to check out a project and possibly browse source and lo and behold I'm not at my desktop. For this reason alone, a mobile GitHub makes sense. Glad to see it at long last.

kmfrk• 13 years ago

Perhaps the move to a wide, non-developer audience finally did it?

cleverjake2• 13 years ago

could you elaborate?

gcb0• 13 years ago

indeed. bitbucket has about a dozen. bitbeaker is pretty decent.

http://blog.bitbucket.org/2011/12/21/mobile-apps-for-bitbuck...

maybe bitbucket is just open-er?

martey• 13 years ago

Github has had mobile apps for a while:

http://mobile.github.com/

Their official Android app was released a year ago, and is open source:

https://github.com/blog/1187-github-android-app-released https://github.com/github/android

Both the comment you replied and Github's blog post are about them making their website mobile-compatible. The fact that Bitbucket has a dozen unofficial mobile applications is not really relevant, and does not tell us anything about how "open" either of the two companies are.

Splendor• 13 years ago

Maybe it's a coincidence but this was a sticking point during a discussion between a couple folks at GitHub and Scott Hanselman on the HanselMinutes podcast episode aired on June 14th.

Link: http://hanselminutes.com/375/on-culture-and-remoteness-at-gi...

shanselman2• 13 years ago

Likely a coincidence, but I'm a little bummed they didn't mention it if they knew it was coming. ;)

kevin1024• 13 years ago

Interesting that they decided not to do a responsive design. Instead, it serves up different HTML if you send a phone user-agent. I've been trying to decide if this is a good idea for my own project.

holman2• 13 years ago

For us, it made sense.

Our desktop site is pretty large. Check the graph in the blog post- the mobile pages are about 1/10th the size of the desktop CSS and JavaScript. By avoiding a responsive design, we can make things load disproportionately faster for our use case. On top of that, it's isolated so we're less likely to break views by adding features later. Pretty fun.

daegloe• 13 years ago

Zach, what was the reasoning behind using such large text for the code view? Will there be a zoom in/out option? Or a text size preference?

charliepark• 13 years ago

Congrats to you and the team on launching this.

I'd love to know the technical approach on this. That is, is the different HTML/CSS/JS view called by the Rails controller, based on the request's user agent? Though responsive designs are often a good call, I completely agree with your decision to do custom views here. I'd love to know where in the process the filtering happens, though, such that you retain the URLs (no "m.github.com") and yet have the customized view. Any backstory on the technical aspects that you can share?

Spiritus2• 13 years ago

Well I guess it's because that gives them the ability to slim down the page size even more, you can only get so far with CSS media queries.

talles• 13 years ago

I'm not that experience with responsive design, but recently I wondered that myself and, for what I saw, I concluded that is too much effort to make it responsive in that level.

Responsive feels great with huge/big/medium displays. With tiny ones I would go with a specific layout (like github did).

foca• 13 years ago

Yeah, it definitely depends on the use case. Some websites just "make sense" on responsive layouts. Others… not so much :)

timothya• 13 years ago

I've been hoping this would happen for a long time. Most of the views look really good, but I'm not very excited about the code view. The font on the code is bigger than necessary, in my opinion, and the word-wrap on the code text just makes it really hard to read.

Displaying code on a narrow window is difficult, but I'm not convinced that this is the right solution. I'd prefer to be able to zoom out.

the_mitsuhiko• 13 years ago

Seems not fully deployed yet or not a full feature. The overview page if you're not signed in, as well as all profiles don't seem to have ombile versions. Same with the news feed.

kickingvegas• 13 years ago

Agreed. While I'm happy to see effort here, it seems half-baked.

Among the many things not there:

* Create new issues * Add tags to issues * View milestones * View diffs

clone1018• 13 years ago

They'll probably want to steer all mobile users to their Github app.

diggan2• 13 years ago

Whoops, the users profile page is redirect to desktop view. Is that on purpose?

jbarnette• 13 years ago

Yup, we're focusing on the pages most likely to be clicked through on mobile first.

joeblau3• 13 years ago

From Windows Mobile 8, I see a blue border around images that are linkable [1].

[1] http://i.imgur.com/bglIKU5.jpg

alanctgardner2• 13 years ago

Can I just say that this is the worst "feature" in the world? It's not just mobile, desktop IE adds a border to images with links by default. As a non-web developer knocking up a site, I didn't think to suppress borders on random elements, and people were asking why the site was ugly in IE 9.

Why isn't there a common, default stylesheet across browsers? Please?

rmrfrmrf• 13 years ago

uhh...css reset? also * { border: 0 }

nathos• 13 years ago

you want http://necolas.github.io/normalize.css/

joeblau3• 13 years ago

I think <blink> was probably worse :). I probably would never even visit GitHub from my mobile device, but I just wanted to point that out.

qntmfred• 13 years ago

Is there a way to change which branch of the repo you're browsing?

carlosdp• 13 years ago

About time! This is awesome!

Afforess• 13 years ago

Kinda useless without the newsfeed. :/

late2part• 13 years ago

Github's in your base, killing your dudes! (OUTAGE!!)

jordanthoms• 13 years ago

Are there updates coming for the Android apps also, or is the focus on mobile web? The Android app doesn't support the one thing I could reasonably do on my phone - reviewing pull requests.

catshirt• 13 years ago

wow, finally! this comes very welcome. although i suppose i must now bid farewell to another one of my repositories :) http://github.com/catshirt/github-mobile

oscardelben2• 13 years ago

Fun fact: years ago I started building an ipad app for Github, but it was rejected multiple times by Apple because users could use it to create a new account but then Apple wouldn't get any commission.

https://github.com/oscardelben/GithubBrowser

CoryG89• 13 years ago

What do you mean Apple wouldn't get any commission? For creating new GitHub accounts? Am I missing something?

jakebellacera• 13 years ago

I think what ocscardelben meant was that Apple wouldn't get any commission off of new, paid, GitHub accounts.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

Apple wants devs to use in-app purchase to sell things in apps . If you don't they don't get their 30% cut of all sales. It's the same reason Amazon can't sell books in the Kindle app, they have to direct users to the website.

BHSPitMonkey• 13 years ago

It's the same problem Dropbox had a while back. Apps using the Dropbox SDK (including the main Dropbox app) showed an interface where you could log into your Dropbox account or click a button to let you sign up for one. Since Dropbox has some paid account plans (like GitHub), Apple decided that this functionality violated its rule stating that all spending that takes place inside the app must happen using the In-App Purchase API so that Apple can get its 30%.

joeblau3• 13 years ago

Since GitHub charges based on a monthly subscription, you can't have an app that charges for a service without going though Apple's In-App Purchase program.

Aqua_Geek• 13 years ago

I have an iPhone app in the store (been there for a while) and it has yet to run into approval issues. FWIW, I don't allow sign-ups from within the app (or direct users to their website to sign up) - I expect users to already have an account.

graue• 13 years ago

I'm sad to see this didn't come with a responsive design for the main site. You get horizontal scrollbars everywhere if your window is thinner than ~1000 pixels, making it impossible to have code + GitHub side by side on a laptop without some serious annoyance. The repo redesign made it worse, as now all the in-project links (issues, pulls, wiki...) are offscreen.

I'd happily work around this by using the mobile view from my desktop browser (as you can do on Wikipedia and many news sites), but GitHub doesn't seem to have made that possible, either.

If any GitHubbers are reading, please make the design (at least a little bit) responsive!

DivisibleByZero• 13 years ago

When I saw the headline I was really hoping this meant that made their site responsive.

Github is pretty much unbearable using a tiling window manager.

shanselman2• 13 years ago

Ya, I just resized expecting to see the mobile site "pop" in but it's a whole 'nother app!

CaptchaReader• 13 years ago

If it was responsive, all they would be doing is "hiding or relocating stuff", but the size (in KB) of each page would be the same for mobile and desktop.

That would make it unusable on a mobile. They NEEDED to do different pages for each, and make it much lighter for mobile.

edvinbesic• 13 years ago

Couldn't this be somewhat mitigated by using progressive enhancement versus graceful degradation?

rjvir• 13 years ago

"Our phones, on the other hand, aren’t great for creating things but they’re perfect for browsing and reading content."

Tell that to Instagram, Vine, Twitter, or Smule. Mobile phones are amazing creation tools.

ben3362• 13 years ago

Any examples of mobile being great for mid-longform text/code content? Github isn't an image site, and the type of content created on it is usually (not always) longer than 140 characters.

vecinu• 13 years ago

All of the tools you mentioned can be replaced by their desktop counterparts.

I would argue against using your mobile device to create relevant content. I know people want an all-in-one toolkit that does everything great but let's go with history on this, it won't work.

A jack of all trades is good but a specialized tool will always be better.

Instagram < Camera + Filter Vine < Video camera + Editing Twitter < (Medium seems to be getting more popular, maybe 140 characters really isn't the future)

I've never heard of Smule.

Again, this is simply my opinion but I feel like some folks are too fast to do everything on their 'mobile device' (let's not call it a smartPHONE).

gambogi• 13 years ago

Instagram, Vine, Twitter, and the like were not written on phones. You're just deliberately misconstruing their point.

ontouchstart• 13 years ago

I started an experiment of writing my blog purely on an iPhone via github web UI. (https://github.com/ontouchstart/blog). Since the mobile view doesn't have the EDIT option, I have to switch to desktop version to edit my posts.

I believe I am a minority in github users. :-)

gms• 13 years ago

How do I close an open pull request from this view? I don't see it.

grobie• 13 years ago

So you're trying to tell me my phone isn't even the right device to make line comments in pull requests?

zhenjl• 13 years ago

Hm..is it me or there's no way to switch branch using the mobile view..

tomchristie• 13 years ago

Mostly pretty great, but it'd be nice to see a couple of controls that have now disappeared.

I can't close or reopen issues anymore, which is something that's super useful to be able to do on the go.

Also there's no way to edit files from the mobile view. Again, something I've often found really useful for quick docs fixes, or adding contributors to the credits after merging a pull request.

swah• 13 years ago

I remember they didn't go with a full client side app for the desktop version, instead opting for something like pjax.

What did they do there, media queries?

6ren• 13 years ago

How can I get the mobile version on my desktop?

AndyKelley• 13 years ago

Octodroid is still the winner, in my opinion.

Bosence• 13 years ago

Is that Jurassic Park in the background of the first image???

technoweenie• 13 years ago

Yes! Now guess the background of the second image :)

cholmon• 13 years ago

"Ferris, get off of the float!"

GitHub's on your phone

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