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Designing GitHub for Mac

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Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#71

Post by cageface »

andrewf wrote: post #66
cageface wrote: post #53

As an aside, I really feel like Apple is losing the plot with their latest batch of UIs. Wooden end panels, birch bookshelves, the glossy reflective dock, leather-bound notebooks etc, all smack of a lack of imagination and an timid need to convey value in outmoded terms.

It's called skeumorphism. You're not the only one. http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/what-apple-needs-t...

What are these but misguided coddles, patronizing crutches, interactively horseless carriages?

Nailed it. Great article. Apple's hardware is as beautiful as ever but their software UI seems to have gone right of the rails. I wish Google's wasn't aping that dumb page curl effect in their own books app.

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#72

Post by nfarina »

tolmasky wrote: post #11

Without going into whether I agree with his assertions on Cocoa, if it seemed so much easier to do with web technologies, why didn't he just do it with web technologies? Cocoa is probably the framework best suited for incorporating web views, and tons of apps do this: Mail.app, iTunes, Aperture, Colloquy, etc. etc. Use the right tool for the right job, if you have something that is going to have a lot of flow-based l…

Completely agree. Cocoa is appropriate for creating minimalist, system-styled UI. Not for rich flow-based content rendering. See Versions.app: native where it makes sense (filesystem treeview), Webkit elsewhere (history browser).

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#73

Post by oscardelben »

leviathan wrote: post #58
oscardelben wrote: post #36

On a related note, i've built a simple github browser for ipad that will never get approved on the AppStore due to paid accounts. If someone wants to play with it here's the link https://github.com/oscardelben/GithubBrowser

You can still create an account and provide the Apple reviewers with credentials to try it. This is what we did for an iPad project that uses Facebook photos, we provided Apple with login credentials to a facebook account with lots of photos in it so that they can test it, and the app was approved from the first submission.

Tried that without success. Maybe it depends on the person examinating it. Btw it took them two months to reject the app so there must have been something going on.

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#74

Post by demallien »

pmjordan wrote: post #18
tptacek wrote: post #4

What a f'ing fantastic article. Thank you so much for writing this. I spent a decent chunk of time last year building up a somewhat large Cocoa application (a telling synecdoche of how ambitious the app is: it integrates libevent with the Cocoa loop and involved writing a whole new evented Redis-backed HTTPS cache in ObjC). But unfortunately, I got to the UI part of this project ("UI part", heh) thinking "this is goi…

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,…

Um, there is a layout engine for Cocoa. It's called UIWebkitView... But the fact that you felt the need to write your own layout system instead of using the existing one suggests that generic layout systems don't give the needed flexibility, which means that it is more important for an API to provide the tools to build a layout system than to provide a layout system. Cocoa is one of the better frameworks for building layout systems in my experience (Java SWT, Cocoa, MFC - haven't tried .NET).

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#75

Post by gawker »

Just wanted to say thank you so very much! I'm just getting started on trying to build an iOS/Mac application system and while it's fairly straightforward to build it, the design of the user interface is what gets me. Going from ok to 'wow' is what really sets Mac applications apart from most PC applications.

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#76

Post by pmjordan »

demallien wrote: post #74
pmjordan wrote: post #18

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,…

Um, there is a layout engine for Cocoa. It's called UIWebkitView... But the fact that you felt the need to write your own layout system instead of using the existing one suggests that generic layout systems don't give the needed flexibility, which means that it is more important for an API to provide the tools to build a layout system than to provide a layout system. Cocoa is one of the better frameworks for building…

UIWebView is (presumably deliberately) pretty restrictive in its JSnative bindings. Having to redirect to URLs which are then intercepted on the Objective-C side is pretty awkward. Then there's the fact that HTML/CSS aren't even that great for designing UIs, since they were created for document styling.

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#77

Post by pnathan »

cageface wrote: post #51
tptacek wrote: post #4

What a f'ing fantastic article. Thank you so much for writing this. I spent a decent chunk of time last year building up a somewhat large Cocoa application (a telling synecdoche of how ambitious the app is: it integrates libevent with the Cocoa loop and involved writing a whole new evented Redis-backed HTTPS cache in ObjC). But unfortunately, I got to the UI part of this project ("UI part", heh) thinking "this is goi…

I've had a similar shock getting into iOS development. I'd never done any Cocoa coding before but had heard it praised so highly over the years that I assumed it was going to be all rolling fields and sunshine. But it really does feel primitive in many ways compared to the modern web. Apple will address some of the biggest pain points (layouts, styling) in their next set of OS releases but it's made me appreciate wha…

The Microsoft visual designers are really easy to use. I was able to figure them out when I was 15 or 16 or so. I can wire together stuff in the wx* toolkits in code by hand.

XCode Interface Builder baffles me still. It's really garbage compared to Visual Studio, IMO. Really a shame.

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#78

Post by pittsburgh »

andrewf wrote: post #66
cageface wrote: post #53

As an aside, I really feel like Apple is losing the plot with their latest batch of UIs. Wooden end panels, birch bookshelves, the glossy reflective dock, leather-bound notebooks etc, all smack of a lack of imagination and an timid need to convey value in outmoded terms.

It's called skeumorphism. You're not the only one. http://speedbird.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/what-apple-needs-t...

Howard Roark (of Ayn Rand's Fountainhead) would hate where Apple is taking their design.

From the book:

"His buildings are austere, logical, perfect, each a single thought in stone. He believes that buildings, like men, have souls, and that no part of a building should in any way betray its soul. No building should borrow its parts from others or apologize for its own shape. No building should present a false front."  

And another quote:

"The buildings in these drawings are like none ever built on earth. They seem severe and simple at first glance, but closer observation reveals the strict tension of thought and method, a cold, beautiful logic behind each wall and pillar. Every building seems to have a soul."

I hope Apple turns down the woodgrain knob and cranks up the cold, beautiful, and logical knob in their future designs.

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#79

Post by TylerE »

jkkramer wrote: post #25

> Simplify the git fetch, pull (--rebase), push interaction. Synchronize — don’t make the user figure out what they need to do to get their local commits remote and remote commits local. What about conflict resolution? That's one of the hairiest, least-user-friendly scenarios in my experience.

What if there was something like a git deploy command? Basically, when you don't actually care about git functionality on the remote (production/staging) end, that would actually change the remote files. (Yes, I know it can be done with a hook, but that's more of a power user solution, and it's still extra work to setup)

Re: Designing GitHub for Mac

#80

Post by ghotli »

beck5 wrote: post #10
ghotli wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using it for about five days and I keep it open alongside textmate. I'm a CLI diehard but I do still find myself using it for things like switching branches and checking what's in a commit. It really does add value as far as that's concerned.

I think you need a terminal window open when using git really (unlike mercurial but lets not fight now). I do however like Tower

I've had both open. They compliment each other.
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