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Designing GitHub for Mac

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Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#32
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same experience with my first Cocoa Touch/UIKit project. The GUI stuff far eclipsed the rest of the app in terms of development effort, which I did not expect. This hadn't been the case with previous GUI stuff I'd done (Windows apps, game UIs and the web), and took me completely by surprise. The "no layouting engine" issue mentioned in the article applies to Cocoa Touch in the same way as it does to Cocoa,…

Any interest in either open sourcing said layout system or perhaps even selling it to those of us who struggle with these sort of problems (a la Sensible TableView)?

We've put some of the styling-related components online on http://appuicomponents.com/ but the layouting engine isn't there yet, I do feel it's valuable enough to productise eventually. The main problem is lack of polish right now. Interface Builder isn't much use once you get to that level of customisation - there's no way to set properties your subclasses introduce, let alone previewing the automatic layouting. I'd like to fix that at some point and have some ideas on how it could be done. Aside from that, I also still need to document the system, and tidy up the code implementing the layouting, as it's currently not the easiest to debug or find out why something isn't being laid out as you were expecting, even if the layout system itself isn't doing anything wrong.

Then of course there's the fact that I'm spending almost all my time on our startup, which is completely unrelated to iOS. (but it has a Cocoa-based Mac GUI, hence my recent Cocoa adventures)

Actually, if you're interested in the layout kit, go ahead and drop me a line (email on the website I mentioned, or in my HN profile) with what you're trying to do - if it does what you want, I'd be quite happy to progressively tidy it up and document it if I've got one or two users who are willing to put up with the rough edges initially, in exchange for some hand-holding.

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#33
It's amazing, I thought I would come here to learn things, but instead I am teaching.

Branching projects is hard in XCode? Zip up the project files and back up the revision... in I don't know, a source code repository? LOL!

None of the re-writing is required in Xcode for your app. Design the app, then make it in Xcode. If you have to make revisions to the design of your app, go back to designing it. Most of the code can be re-used, but clearly you haven't finished designing the app yet...

Interesting take on the initial experience. But instead of casting about for blame, it might be better to ask why your processes are going wrong.

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#34
post #28

> Death of the SSH key. People should be able to connect to GitHub with their GitHub username and password. This sounds like a wrong design decision. I wish nobody could log into my github account using anything but my SSH keys. This is also true of my AWS account: my ec2 instances are protected by SSH keypairs, but if anyone gets my AWS password, he has full control over everything. I'm not a security expert, but SS…

I think their goal was to make GitHub (and by extension git itself) more accessible to people who code, but are not familiar/comfortable enough with command line Unix or SSH to generate SSH keypairs. There are a lot of these people. Although I agree that SSH keypairs feel more secure than a username/password, it would make setting up a new machine for development a lot easier than generating a new SSH keypair and add…

Couldn't the app use your username / password to connect to github the first time and then generate an SSH key pair which it would use from that point forward?

That seems like the best compromise of security and easy of use to me.

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#35

> Death of the SSH key. People should be able to connect to GitHub with their GitHub username and password. This sounds like a wrong design decision. I wish nobody could log into my github account using anything but my SSH keys. This is also true of my AWS account: my ec2 instances are protected by SSH keypairs, but if anyone gets my AWS password, he has full control over everything. I'm not a security expert, but SS…

[deleted]

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#37

> Death of the SSH key. People should be able to connect to GitHub with their GitHub username and password. This sounds like a wrong design decision. I wish nobody could log into my github account using anything but my SSH keys. This is also true of my AWS account: my ec2 instances are protected by SSH keypairs, but if anyone gets my AWS password, he has full control over everything. I'm not a security expert, but SS…

Since GitHub launched, you've been able to access your repositories via username/password (and add/remove ssh keys via the web interface). But remember — we're talking about client security.

If someone steals/owns your personal machine it's actually much easier to gain access to SSH Keys than find your username/password (since an alarming number of people use passwordless ssh keys).

Aside from that though — SSH Keys are probably the biggest barrier to people being able to use and contribute with GitHub.

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#38
post #34
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think their goal was to make GitHub (and by extension git itself) more accessible to people who code, but are not familiar/comfortable enough with command line Unix or SSH to generate SSH keypairs. There are a lot of these people. Although I agree that SSH keypairs feel more secure than a username/password, it would make setting up a new machine for development a lot easier than generating a new SSH keypair and add…

Couldn't the app use your username / password to connect to github the first time and then generate an SSH key pair which it would use from that point forward? That seems like the best compromise of security and easy of use to me.

Then the client would only work easily with Github. That would be very sad for those of us who deploy Git repos on other servers than Github.

As it is, I'm pretty sure this is using standard HTTPS auth with Git, which is not that hard to support.

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#39
Smartgit is an awesome client for mac and I love the diffs view. Git is complicated so does a simple client help or hurt? I think that's up for debate and different users are going to have different requirements but for me I feel Smartgit is simplistic, useful, and functional where as I think of the Github client as more of an RSS type application where I check the latest stuff that has been committed.
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