Comment by ardell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ardell | Hacker News Reader

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Talk with some web designers who have been looking for a decent gui tool for git. They don't want to learn to use command line and aren't happy with existing tool support. They are your market. Go to a local designer meetup group and sell your software to every one of them.

Iterate on feedback, absolutely, but don't iterate on feedback of hackers, iterate on feedback of people who actually want your software and are in your target market.

If you're dead-set on developers as your market, there are a ton of folks who still use svn with a gui because "no good git guis exist". These are the non-power-users of version control. You're not likely to find them here or on super-technical sites, but they do exist and there are many of them. The unfortunate part is that if you market to them you'll probably end up having to build an Eclipse plug-in.

This is the biggest obstacle to getting web developers moved over to Git at work. I am moving the team to task branches over the next few months, and the whole idea of branching/merging/pushing/pulling is proving difficult for them to internalize. They can handle basic branching and the svn model, but for Git to be successful in my organization, I'll need something like this.

I registered to encourage development of tools such as this and to give it a thorough run-through at work.

Absolutely right! One of the guys I was working with at my last contract was an old Java guy that loved Eclipse. We talked about moving from SVN to Git but he resisted because there was no good, proven, stable, active development GUI for Git in Eclipse. Build that plug-in and you can charge for it - guaranteed!

Thanks for the inspiration :-)

> "If you're dead-set on developers as your market, there are a ton of folks who still use svn with a gui because "no good git guis exist". These are the non-power-users of version control."

Look at all the unanswered questions in Google results for how to integrate Mercurial or Git into Coda.

This class of developer is looking for tools between Dreamweaver and curl -- arguably, most developers.

Turning your tool into a plugin or add-on to some existing editors would garner a lot of them, with those editors' sites serving as a marketing platform too.

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