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There's a map for that

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Re: There's a map for that

#61

Post by saosebastiao »

A little UI feedback if anybody from GitHub is listening:

When you click and hold to move the map, and you scroll the mouse all the way off the map, the map acts like you are continuing to hold the mouse button down, even if you let go of the mouse button. When you return the mouse to the map, it acts like the button is still pressed and the map sticks to the pointer...for which you have to click again to get out.

This is unexpected behavior, especially if you are trying to scroll through more than one screen with repetitive mouse drags. The map scrolling should maintain the same behavior of the mouse button hold even if you scroll off the map.

Re: There's a map for that

#62

Post by sdesol »

jervisfm wrote: post #60
sdesol wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. I find that unified diffs work well 90% of the time but when it doesn't it can be crippling. I've attached some screenshots at http://screenshots.gitsense.com/index.html that illustrates where side by side becomes a requirement for me. Yeah I can make sense of things with a unified view but the side by side really makes things more obvious. Note you can find this diff at github at https://github.com/joyent/n…

What program or tool were you using to see the diffs side by side ?

It's from my tool that I've been developing. You can see how the diffing works at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi7GvcW1NKA

Unfortunately I don't show you how to switch to the side by side view. To do this, you just click on the view toggle button at the top left corner of the diff window.

Re: There's a map for that

#63

Post by yellowbkpk »

jmduke wrote: post #58
kondro wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst I have no insider knowledge, I highly doubt GitHub has any desire to expand outside of the development community.

They already have expanded outside of the development community. https://github.com/Chicago

I suggested the City of Chicago use Github because it is the only place to put open data that both (a) allows contributions back to the dataset (pull requests) and (b) allows for community feedback (issues and comments).

It's by no means ideal (the building footprints dataset is hidden behind a 2GB compressed JSON blob) but it's still useful and a step in the right direction.

It's still aimed squarely at developers using the data, though. Asking a "normal citizen" to submit a pull request is still a pretty big ask.

Re: There's a map for that

#64

Post by asperous »

buro9 wrote: post #12

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 e…

People forget this, but even though git was developed for programming version control, there isn't a lot that makes it useful strictly for programming only.

Git is a powerful version control and collaboration system for any plain text (or maybe even binary) files.

There's nothing special about programmers that makes it so they are the only ones that can learn about these tools and use them. With something like TortoiseGit (or Github's app) I can totally see people you would never expect start taking advantage of this.

Authors, mathematicians, research agents, cartographers, government agents (all those legal documents need version control badly), lawyers, etc.

As the world trusts computers with more and more of their files, they might start picking up the tools that programmers have held so dear.

Why not empower them?

Re: There's a map for that

#65

Post by derleth »

asperous wrote: post #64
buro9 wrote: post #12

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 e…

People forget this, but even though git was developed for programming version control, there isn't a lot that makes it useful strictly for programming only. Git is a powerful version control and collaboration system for any plain text (or maybe even binary) files. There's nothing special about programmers that makes it so they are the only ones that can learn about these tools and use them. With something like Tortoi…

Torvalds, in classic Unix hacker fashion, designed git to be so stupid it doesn't care what it's being used for, which goes quite a long way to making it all things to all people.

Similar is how the Linux filesystem code flatly refuses to care about what encoding scheme filenames use as long as the byte 0x2F (ASCII '/') is only used to separate pathname components, the byte sequences 0x2E (".") and 0x2E 0x2E ("..") appearing alone in a component are special, and the byte 0x00 (ASCII nul) is only used to terminate the entire pathname. The kernel is so stupid it only sees byte sequences and only cares about those specific values and sequences; as a direct result, users can use any character encoding which guarantees those values will only be used for their respective purposes, and rely on easily-configurable applications to sort it out.

Here's Torvalds, Viro, and Ts'o chewing out someone who thought the kernel should enforce UTF-8 file and directory names:

http://yarchive.net/comp/linux/utf8.html

Re: There's a map for that

#66

Post by voltagex_ »

holman wrote: post #16
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.

Cool. I wonder what the conversion workflow --> GeoJSON is like? KPX and CSV and XLS are common over at data.gov.au / data.act.gov.au

Re: There's a map for that

#67

Post by timr »

gonehome wrote: post #14
callmeed wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Github doesn't have any central direction at all (people are more or less allowed to work on whatever they like), and this is a side-effect: the boring stuff doesn't get worked on, and the fun stuff (like, say, rendering 3d models, or a CLI in the header) gets lots of attention.

I think Github is probably vulnerable to a team that stays focused on the bread-and-butter tools that are actually important to developers.

Re: There's a map for that

#68

Post by reledi »

gcr wrote: post #49
spikels wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I second the call for supporting books. There are already quite a few books being published on GitHub and it seems like an almost natural way to collaboratively write a book that could forever kept up to date. Not sure if anything has been done specifically to support writing a book on GitHub.

I'm a grad student who writes lots of papers in LaTeX with collaborators. We use git most of the time, but git works most painlessly when you tweak it to ignore whitespace and to use word diffs. For example, let's say that my collaborator says "oh, I pushed a new diff" and now I'm curious what he added. Running: git pull && git log -p -w --color-words lets me see exactly which words he added/removed/changed ignoring…

> I imagine github could incorporate some of these tools too.

GitHub allows you to ignore whitespace in diffs by appending _?w=1_ to the URL [1]. They should make this more obvious with a button in the diff interface.

[1] https://github.com/blog/967-github-secrets

Re: There's a map for that

#69

Post by mtodd »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #38

Since GitHub is starting to feel Emacs-like, why not go fully in this direction? Add a "dotfile" repository for everyone to manage their own client-side JavaScript extensions for Github that would be loaded by default. And then let people collaborate, share and create extensions and "configurations". Want a better map? Fork the official one and modify it. And then let others fork from you.

You could achieve something like that using https://github.com/defunkt/dotjs

Re: There's a map for that

#70

Post by rmc »

derleth wrote: post #65
asperous wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People forget this, but even though git was developed for programming version control, there isn't a lot that makes it useful strictly for programming only. Git is a powerful version control and collaboration system for any plain text (or maybe even binary) files. There's nothing special about programmers that makes it so they are the only ones that can learn about these tools and use them. With something like Tortoi…

Torvalds, in classic Unix hacker fashion, designed git to be so stupid it doesn't care what it's being used for, which goes quite a long way to making it all things to all people. Similar is how the Linux filesystem code flatly refuses to care about what encoding scheme filenames use as long as the byte 0x2F (ASCII '/') is only used to separate pathname components, the byte sequences 0x2E (".") and 0x2E 0x2E ("..") a…

I thought ".." was a hardlink to the parent directory created when a directory was created? Hence the kernel doesn't actually have to treat ".." as anything special, since, due to hardlinks, "it'll all work out"?
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