Stay on top of Github pull requests with Trailer.app

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7107531

by mezis • 13 years ago

27 19 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Do you ever find yourself losing track of GitHub pull requests and comments? Do you think that having to check your email for notifications isn’t really integrated and is kind of spammy?

Well, we do. So we made Trailer.app (http://goo.gl/DY68RI) for your menu bar.

Whether you’re an open source project manager, a contributor, or a software engineer in a company; there’s a good chance that development is a social activity, and you’re probably using GitHub to support your work right?

We felt there should be a better option than email notifications. Nobody likes spam, except Monty Python fans.

Fortunately, Trailer.app is available! It’s an open source OS X menu bar app that lists pull requests you’re involved in and notifies you of any new activity.

Trailer is brought to you by the HouseTrip geek squad, and we’re really excited to open it up and see if it helps anyone else as much as it’s helped us.

Try it out, and please feel free to submit patches and ideas to Trailer’s GitHub repo! ^_^

(https://github.com/HouseTrip/trailer)

marcusmitchell• 13 years ago

Simple and great. Many thanks for this. Working in a large team and being able to keep on top of current PRs has just been made a great deal easier. (Y)

jbranchaud• 13 years ago

Nice app. Looks clean and straight-forward to use and I like the name! Also, thanks for open sourcing!!

Only question, why just pull requests and not all GitHub issue activity?

mezis7• 13 years ago

Probably because we (HouseTrip) tend to not use Github issues for internal projects.

But that's a very valid point, thanks for the suggestion. Perhaps you'd like to open an issue on the Trailer repo and propose a change?

tadejm• 13 years ago

Nice! Will certainly give it a go!

basil• 13 years ago

This is awesome, well done!

I just wanted to chime in and say I like your approach of just focusing on pull requests. There's another app I know of that just focuses on creating issues (http://issuepostapp.com).

I happen to be the author of another GitHub Issues client (http://neat.io/bee/github-issues-client.html) which is aimed at the other end of the spectrum: to be full-featured.

Great to see all these different approaches for different workflows.

mezis7• 13 years ago

Bee.app looks awesome!

Definitely will give it a try, to get and idea whether I should part with those $49. Could well be the case to intense Githubbers.

buf• 13 years ago

This app will do wonders for my team. Thanks a lot. This is great.

mezis7• 13 years ago

Thanks buf! That's very nice to hear! Do tell us how it works for you, and bug reports are always welcome of course :)

dominotw• 13 years ago

This application requires OS X 10.9 or later.

mezis7• 13 years ago

We'll happily take patches to make it 10.8 compatible if you're stuck with that and Cocoa-savvy!

jamiecurle• 13 years ago

I really like this, PR's are a crucial part of my workflow and they are one of the few notifications that I actually don't mind getting.

mezis7• 13 years ago

Introducing Trailer has really improved our workflow—since we introduced it last year, +50% pull request activity! (our team activity graphed: http://cl.ly/image/1X1R0m2a0S1i)

otikik• 13 years ago

For pull requests, I go to https://github.com/dashboard/pulls/

For comments, I go to https://github.com/notifications

Maybe if I had hundreds of pull requests per week I would need something more elaborate, but for my current situation it's enough.

I never check my email for these.

mezis7• 13 years ago

That's completely fair otikik---try to imagine a situation in a team (ours) where the average is 30 pull requests a day and north of 100 comments.

Different workflows and environements, different tools.

As far as I'm concerned, I find Trailer handy even for my weekend side projects as it lets me reply to PRs and comments from contributors more quickly (I might forget refreshing Github's web UI, and emails, well...).

YMMV may vary of course. We're just glad to offer you an extra option :)

sdesol• 13 years ago

"I never check my email for these."

I've never been a big fan of email for things like this because they can get pretty noisy. To solve the having to track a lot of pull requests problem with minimal noise, I decided to go with a more self serve approach. The idea is to let users create logical groups for tracking pull requests. Below is an example of a logical group that lets you track individual pull requests from 6 different repos.

http://ny.testdrive.gitsense.com/index?#pid=24&cid=29&trail=

If you click on the links in the black bar, you can see how you can control the amount of noise. Everything is programmable so you can have it display whatever you want.

jvandyke• 13 years ago

This is amazing guys! Thank you so much, it's exactly what our team needed.

istvanp• 13 years ago

I like it! Some suggestions:

- Make the Pref / About etc. submenu an expandable item from the main menu instead of requiring an extra click (I know you were going for minimalism but it's not that intuitive)

- In the pref window list all the sorting options instead of adding a toggle for reversing direction

- Prompt to create or enter a token immediately on first run

- Auto load project list if there is no cache of it

mezis7• 13 years ago

Thanks for the suggestions! I'll add Github issues for those.

davidslv• 13 years ago

I'm very happy to use this app to be honest this just improved a lot how we keep track of our PR's across all the repositories that we currently have.

Stay on top of Github pull requests with Trailer.app

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