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Comment by moe | Hacker News Reader

That said, the interface seems a bit too "inspired" by Github. I hope they rethink how an application like this should work for themselves rather than allowing Github to influence their designs.

I don't understand your critique.

My impression of Gitlab is that they've done it exactly right. They copied the good parts from github but not the clutter, and it's looking pretty damn good so far.

Most notably they did not copy the non-hierarchical triple-menubar trainwreck of an UI-disaster (whoever came up with that at github should be fired three times in a row).

Instead Gitlab has a boring, utterly intuitive two-level hierarchical menu, consistently on every page. I love this boring menubar.

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There are a couple reasons app developers should strive for originality. Copying Github's design only reminds me of how your app is second to Github. That Github was the one who thought of the beautiful interface and that by using your app I will be using a copy and not the original. The copy is inferior to the original in my mind and I will never see the app as an equal. This really dampens the excitement I have for it because it might never be able to compete with the experience Github provides.

Another example is Open Office, everyone uses it and it does the job. But no one loves it, because its a copy. Its not the original and it will never be the same as using MS Office. Now compare that with Apple's iWork. Its not a copy; its an original. When I use it, I feel comfortable in knowing that Apple has worked to provide an experience that is second to none.

There are some flaws in your analogy.

1. Most people I know like Github's UI, so it makes sense to copy it. MS Office is not known for it's UI experience. So it doesn't make sense to copy it.

2. Creating a good UI is hard work. When you're Apple, you have the resources to throw at iWork. An open source project doesn't have the same resources, and they might spend a lot of time to end up with something worse than Github's UI.

To me it's a simple decision: 1. Spend a lot of time and end up with something that could be better than Github but will probably be worse OR 2. Spend little time to copy a design everyone is familiar with and likes.

I think a better analogy would be Gimp vs Photoshop. Supposedly Gimp can do almost everything Photoshop can, but what % of designers use Gimp? They have been slowly moving towards Photoshop's UI because they now realize how much of a factor that plays in adoption.

I for one love LibreOffice Writer and find it to be much more intuitive and configurable than Word. Draw and Calc leave something to be desired, but the needs they fill are better served by Adobe products and R respectively, imho.

I agree on the menu bar. Consistency in UI being present on every page is something that deserves applause. There's a point to be made about similarity in overall look and feel to Github, but I don't believe that even Github has a clean-room implementation of a source code hosting web application. So,- tough luck. Add ability to make Gitlab skinnable and it's good enough for me.

I definitely agree with this, where I think the UI is too similar is in the color scheme, and other general look-and-feel things. The rounded corners if you will. GitLab could probably do something different.

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