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Comment by earless1 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, this seems like a cool product. I can't imagine building a product that relies so heavily on the UI of another service. How are updates handled?

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I couldn't imagine getting all my team to use this product and then suddently GitHub updates their UI and this plug-in is broken for days or weeks before an update hits the Chrome app store. This seems like a huge deal breaker.

That's exactly my concern. I'm currently considering between waffle.io and huboard - and in general it seems to me safer that they use github's API, compared to Zenhub, which (is this the right expression?) 'monkey-patches' the front-end.

Being only usable in Chrome is also a disadvantage of zenhub in my opinion.

Zenhub uses the API, they just patch a few new things into Github's web pages. It doesn't seem that fragile to me.

It could stop being able to insert content into the page if the structure changed. If they're smart they'll have tests that periodically check it still works and alert them if it doesn't. If they're smarter they'll have it work out where on the page the target has moved to and update the extension automatically with a fix if it can find one.

Not to mention Github uses feature toggling. So even users of the same team can have different versions of the UI, but almost certainly across the entire user base.

Have you taken a look at Blossom as well? A few friends were telling me they have a killer Github integration.

really? I did, but I found the github integration lacking actually. Lots of 'coming soon' functionality on the documentation pages last time I checked.

huboard and waffle are much more tightly integrated with github from what I saw, to the extent that all data lives in github, they just display it on a kanban board (as far as I could tell).

You're 100% correct. Blossom/trello/jira etc all suffer from the same data replication problem, though blossom is a pretty product. It was among the products we tried to use before deciding to build ZenHub in the first place! Huboard and Waffle assuage this somewhat, but they still require your team to jump around between different tools, causing workflow fragmentation. ZenHub is the only product that avoids both flaws.

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