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GitHub's on your phone

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Re: GitHub's on your phone

#51

Post by charliepark »

holman wrote: post #10
kevin1024 wrote: post #8

Interesting that they decided not to do a responsive design. Instead, it serves up different HTML if you send a phone user-agent. I've been trying to decide if this is a good idea for my own project.

For us, it made sense. Our desktop site is pretty large. Check the graph in the blog post- the mobile pages are about 1/10th the size of the desktop CSS and JavaScript. By avoiding a responsive design, we can make things load disproportionately faster for our use case. On top of that, it's isolated so we're less likely to break views by adding features later. Pretty fun.

Congrats to you and the team on launching this.

I'd love to know the technical approach on this. That is, is the different HTML/CSS/JS view called by the Rails controller, based on the request's user agent? Though responsive designs are often a good call, I completely agree with your decision to do custom views here. I'd love to know where in the process the filtering happens, though, such that you retain the URLs (no "m.github.com") and yet have the customized view. Any backstory on the technical aspects that you can share?

Re: GitHub's on your phone

#52

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

CoryG89 wrote: post #44
oscardelben wrote: post #42

Fun fact: years ago I started building an ipad app for Github, but it was rejected multiple times by Apple because users could use it to create a new account but then Apple wouldn't get any commission. https://github.com/oscardelben/GithubBrowser

What do you mean Apple wouldn't get any commission? For creating new GitHub accounts? Am I missing something?

It's the same problem Dropbox had a while back. Apps using the Dropbox SDK (including the main Dropbox app) showed an interface where you could log into your Dropbox account or click a button to let you sign up for one. Since Dropbox has some paid account plans (like GitHub), Apple decided that this functionality violated its rule stating that all spending that takes place inside the app must happen using the In-App Purchase API so that Apple can get its 30%.

Re: GitHub's on your phone

#53

Post by [deleted] »

timothya wrote: post #12

I've been hoping this would happen for a long time. Most of the views look really good, but I'm not very excited about the code view. The font on the code is bigger than necessary, in my opinion, and the word-wrap on the code text just makes it really hard to read. Displaying code on a narrow window is difficult, but I'm not convinced that this is the right solution. I'd prefer to be able to zoom out.

[deleted]

Re: GitHub's on your phone

#54

Post by graue »

I'm sad to see this didn't come with a responsive design for the main site. You get horizontal scrollbars everywhere if your window is thinner than ~1000 pixels, making it impossible to have code + GitHub side by side on a laptop without some serious annoyance. The repo redesign made it worse, as now all the in-project links (issues, pulls, wiki...) are offscreen.

I'd happily work around this by using the mobile view from my desktop browser (as you can do on Wikipedia and many news sites), but GitHub doesn't seem to have made that possible, either.

If any GitHubbers are reading, please make the design (at least a little bit) responsive!

Re: GitHub's on your phone

#55

Post by rjvir »

"Our phones, on the other hand, aren’t great for creating things but they’re perfect for browsing and reading content."

Tell that to Instagram, Vine, Twitter, or Smule. Mobile phones are amazing creation tools.

Re: GitHub's on your phone

#57

Post by ben336 »

rjvir wrote: post #55

"Our phones, on the other hand, aren’t great for creating things but they’re perfect for browsing and reading content." Tell that to Instagram, Vine, Twitter, or Smule. Mobile phones are amazing creation tools.

Any examples of mobile being great for mid-longform text/code content? Github isn't an image site, and the type of content created on it is usually (not always) longer than 140 characters.

Re: GitHub's on your phone

#58

Post by ben336 »

clone1018 wrote: post #28
kickingvegas wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. While I'm happy to see effort here, it seems half-baked. Among the many things not there: * Create new issues * Add tags to issues * View milestones * View diffs

They'll probably want to steer all mobile users to their Github app.

which only exists (in a full form) for Android. I think they're just focusing on a fast read only implementation, with the tradeoff being fewer features.

Re: GitHub's on your phone

#59

Post by DivisibleByZero »

graue wrote: post #54

I'm sad to see this didn't come with a responsive design for the main site. You get horizontal scrollbars everywhere if your window is thinner than ~1000 pixels, making it impossible to have code + GitHub side by side on a laptop without some serious annoyance. The repo redesign made it worse, as now all the in-project links (issues, pulls, wiki...) are offscreen. I'd happily work around this by using the mobile view…

When I saw the headline I was really hoping this meant that made their site responsive.

Github is pretty much unbearable using a tiling window manager.

Re: GitHub's on your phone

#60

Post by joeblau »

CoryG89 wrote: post #44
oscardelben wrote: post #42

Fun fact: years ago I started building an ipad app for Github, but it was rejected multiple times by Apple because users could use it to create a new account but then Apple wouldn't get any commission. https://github.com/oscardelben/GithubBrowser

What do you mean Apple wouldn't get any commission? For creating new GitHub accounts? Am I missing something?

Since GitHub charges based on a monthly subscription, you can't have an app that charges for a service without going though Apple's In-App Purchase program.
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