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GitHub's on your phone

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279 pointsoBeLx81 comments

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.

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

could you elaborate?

It was recently the feature of a blog post: https://github.com/blog/1557-github-flow-in-the-browser

Even with the ability to CRUD files from the browser I don't think github would fit non dev audience with well. Most normal people use word processor or a spreadsheet program, those files aren't well suited for git and you can't edit them on github

I bet they're not far off though. .docx and .xlsx files are (mostly) just zipped XML files: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

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?

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.

iOctocat for iOS is also open source - though they charge in the App Store (depending on how you feel about supporting the organization as a whole).

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...

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

Secrets! We test things like that for quite some time before we release it. We know it's good when coworkers start asking, "Wait, this isn't shipped yet? Why not?!"

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

YES

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

To make it easy to read code. :) It feels pretty comfortable- squinting isn't fun.

We tend to avoid user preferences. If it ends up being a problem, we'll lower the text size at some point.

It seems a bit extreme on my Nexus 4... http://i.imgur.com/hagaiLR.png

Speaking of the code view, any plans on adding code commenting capability on mobile? This has been a bit difficult to use on a phone because the click target is so small on the desktop version.

I can't resist doing code reviews even when I'm away from keyboard :)

I'm old and I like big fonts. But on my Galaxy Note II, this is too big for me.

I like word wrap too, but I'd like to be able to switch it off. In my desktop code editors, I generally use proportional fonts and enable word wrap, but sometimes I also like to be able to see the structure of the code without the word wrap.

I think font size and word wrap should be things that are easy to toggle right there while you're looking at the code. Not in an option setting somewhere. Or enable pinch-zoom for the font size and just have an option to toggle word wrap.

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?

37Signals did something similar, which you might find helpful:

http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3257-backstage-basecamp-for-m...

https://public.basecamp.com/1679267/projects/764604-bcx-phon...

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.

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).

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

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. :-)

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

I don't understand this line of thinking. If I'm a Github user and I'm on the website from a phone and go to create an issue then that's actually what I'm hoping to do.

which only exists (in a full form) for Android. I think they're just focusing on a fast read only implementation, with the tradeoff being fewer features.

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.

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

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.

Pretty sure they use PJAX.

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

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

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

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

It's currently very simple.

The mobile app is just part of our main web app. We use the same models and controllers as our desktop views. We have separate markup, different bundles for mobile JavaScript and CSS, and separate view models[1].

[1] http://warpspire.com/posts/mustache-style-erb/

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.

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

"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.

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.

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).

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

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

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

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

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?

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!

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

Kinda useless without the newsfeed. :/

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

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

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

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

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

"Ferris, get off of the float!"

How can I get the mobile version on my desktop?

Octodroid is still the winner, in my opinion.

About time! This is awesome!

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

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