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There's a map for that

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Re: There's a map for that

#11

Post by noelwelsh »

I wonder about priorities when I read this. For example, how do I diff two commits via Github? There is a blog post describing this feature:

https://github.com/blog/612-introducing-github-compare-view

However it seems the UI has changed, and the only way I could find to use it was to manually construct the URL.

I'd love for someone to show me some obvious UI I've missed. Diffing is really fundamental for a VCS. I'd much rather Github cleaned up the UI for existing features than added these little flourishes that I can't imagine even 1% of users use.

Re: There's a map for that

#12

Post by buro9 »

I'm increasingly thinking that the biggest competitor we have isn't other forum software (who aren't innovating), but Github.

Our startup ( http://microco.sm/ ) is working on improving communities, which most people read as vBulletin, phpBB, Discourse... but my view is simply that if you have a group of people together around some interest (topic, locality, project) that they want to communicate, share, transact at every level.

And that, the fragmented experience of going to Google Maps, Facebook Events or Eventbrite, Wikipedia, review sites, eBay, etc... just to bring the last 5% into a community... well that's frustrating and a poor user experience.

Instead the first 60-80% of the functionality elsewhere should just be in the tool. Where the community already is.

And we're starting with forums and going outward, in every direction (it feels). And here is github, starting with the code, and also heading outward, in every direction.

I've a great deal of love for Github (as a dev, how could I not)... so I wish them well. They're solving things from a dev/work perspective, and we're aiming at consumers/users/hobbies/interests... but still, I've no doubt that we've a lot to learn from them, and when we're up to speed perhaps we can teach them a thing or two.

Re: There's a map for that

#13

Post by EthanHeilman »

bitops wrote: post #3

I am curious if anyone has any insight as to what GitHub's strategy is with this move? It seems that they are steadily tracking towards a browser-based cloud IDE. GitHub also seems to be a popular choice for devs hosting their blogs. I wonder if they're hoping to be a more all-round app hosting service?

Github is becoming, in addition to a place to share code/data, the commandline program between "cat data |" and someone else's eyes.

cat gps_data.txt | github --pretty-maps > the world

Re: There's a map for that

#14

Post by gonehome »

callmeed wrote: post #7
bitops wrote: post #3

I am curious if anyone has any insight as to what GitHub's strategy is with this move? It seems that they are steadily tracking towards a browser-based cloud IDE. GitHub also seems to be a popular choice for devs hosting their blogs. I wonder if they're hoping to be a more all-round app hosting service?

The recent Inc. article [1] about GitHub isn't really deep but the end has some insights: a shift is taking place: "Now we are finding that it's not just about the code; it's about, 'Hey, I want to work on this with you.' That's really eye-opening to us and gets everyone here superexcited. Working with someone else is just an awesome part of being alive. Creating art, creating tools, creating documents, doing homewor…

This reminds me of trying to determine the scope of your company.

I remember reading somewhere (probably here) that part of the reason the railroads failed to adapt to cars was because they thought of themselves as railroad companies instead of transportation companies. Maybe github is thinking of themselves as a collaborative work company rather than a collaborative coding company and trying to adapt to that.

Re: There's a map for that

#15

Post by hughes »

philjackson wrote: post #8

I'd love to know where these ideas come from. All the way from the top? Product? Developers with a 20% time window? They've always been innovative and despite size/growth/scale seem to be able to keep that up.

I wouldn't be surprised if the request came from a user. I've seen a couple features get implemented after suggesting them via the contact form.

Re: There's a map for that

#16

Post by holman »

philjackson wrote: post #8

I'd love to know where these ideas come from. All the way from the top? Product? Developers with a 20% time window? They've always been innovative and despite size/growth/scale seem to be able to keep that up.

> Developers with a 20% time window?

We like to call it 100% time. Work on what you're interested in.

In this case, Ben — who handles a lot of our outreach to government agencies — knew that GeoJSON is something that could be a big deal for open data in government, so he built the feature. There's not much more to it than that.

Re: There's a map for that

#17

Post by graue »

Hmm, on Firefox 23.0a2 I just see a white box with nothing there. Usually this means an addon is interfering somehow. But I turned off AdBlock, Ghostery, HTTPS Everywhere, Flashblock and Greasemonkey, which is basically everything, and reloaded, and still nothing. Anyone else?

(Edit: All fixed, thanks Oompa!)

Re: There's a map for that

#18

Post by cobychapple »

noelwelsh wrote: post #11

I wonder about priorities when I read this. For example, how do I diff two commits via Github? There is a blog post describing this feature: https://github.com/blog/612-introducing-github-compare-view However it seems the UI has changed, and the only way I could find to use it was to manually construct the URL. I'd love for someone to show me some obvious UI I've missed. Diffing is really fundamental for a VCS. I'd m…

The main way to get to the compare view is from the branches page:

1. View the branches page: https://github.com/github/markup/branches 2. Click the "Compare" button next to a branch. 3. On the following page there’s a control at the top where you can change the comparison range to compare any branch, tag, or SHA with any other.

Hope that helps!

Re: There's a map for that

#19

Post by NoodleIncident »

noelwelsh wrote: post #11

I wonder about priorities when I read this. For example, how do I diff two commits via Github? There is a blog post describing this feature: https://github.com/blog/612-introducing-github-compare-view However it seems the UI has changed, and the only way I could find to use it was to manually construct the URL. I'd love for someone to show me some obvious UI I've missed. Diffing is really fundamental for a VCS. I'd m…

Why not just do that locally?

Github lets you see the diff for a single commit on their site. This makes sense, because you can use this information to take action on their site, by either approving or denying the pull request.

The only use case for commit-commit diffs that I can think of, though, is if you plan on manually merging them and resolving conflicts, which you cannot do on Github (to my knowledge). There exist many graphical and command-line utilities that you can run on your machine, the same place you will be making those changes.

To me, Github's two jobs are to host reposiitories, and to make it easy to find and view the repositories of others. They do both of these jobs very well, and this map plugin makes Github better at the second in at least some cases. Once it comes time to actually start changing things, though, I get off of Github, and work on the local copy I have with the tools on my machine. Replicating this functionality isn't, to me, what Github is for.

As an aside, if there is a way to manually construct a url, there's a shortcut to getting Github to add it to the UI. A few months ago, someone made a JavaScript bookmarklet to add a search bar to any repository, since the UI for this functionality was so clunky. Because of its popularity, Github added a proper repository-specific search bar.

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