Show HN: GitHub and Bitbucket browsing reimagined
gitsense.github.io
gitsense.github.io
You have a situation like Bitbucket where they are focused on creating a product that is designed to be built on top of, but they really aren't getting a lot of love.
https://marketplace.atlassian.com/plugins/app/bitbucket
GitHub on the other hand, requires you to parse DOM objects, but people are still building on top of it. I'd have to imagine there will be some turning point in the future, where this will change. If GitLab and Bitbucket can sort out its UX, I can see developers focusing more on developing for their platform.
The issue with GitLab's UX right now, is there is a lot of little things, which adds up to big things. This is expected since UX is hard and if you look at GitHub's interface from 5 years ago, they (GitHub) would probably feel embarrassed by some of the things that they have done.
For things to improve, you need a lot of feedback/iterations and I won't be surprised if GitHub's UX evolution was the result of strong feedback from designers outside of GitHub. By being the first movers, GitHub was able to attract everybody, which included designers.
GitLab right now is not attractive for designers. To overcome this, I would personally put some resources into showcasing how you can tweak GitLab's CSS without having to dig into Ruby or JavaScript or anything else. And if it is not easy to do, design GitLab so it is.
Right now the fonts in GitLab really bug me, and I want to use the font that GitHub is using. GitHub has really nailed fonts among other things.
If there was a simple way for people to tweak GitLab's UX without having to understand anything else, I can see it drawing in a lot more people and creating a lot more feedback. Also create a way for people to showcase their tweaks. I'm sure 90% of them will be crap, but that 10% can make all the difference in the world.
I might be over analyzing things, but I think GitLab's desire to be no longer called a "GitHub clone" is creating too many poor design decisions. The recent move to put the search icon in the middle of the search text field is an example of this. I'm pretty sure designers at Google, Twitter, Microsoft, etc. played around with the icon placement and found that putting it in the middle was not a good idea. If it was a good idea, we would have seen more sites/products adopt this.
So to make the long story short, to improve your UX situation, make it insanely easy for designers to tweak things and to share/showcase their tweaks.
To summarize:
1. Make a blog post how to tweak's GitLab CSS
2. Consider using another font
3. Allow people to showcase their work
4. Move the search icon back to the left
One thing we can't do is customizing the interface of GitLab (except for the colors) since this causes things to break without a lot of testing.
1. Good idea https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/blog-posts/issues/153
2. I've shared this suggestion with our team, if you care deeply about it consider opening an issue on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues
3. As a showcase we ask people to open a merge request on https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/merge_requests with before/after screenshots
4. I've made https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/13919
Thanks again for the feedback and keep it coming.
I'm the creator behind GitSense and I'm going to start private beta trials in about a week or two. Right now I'm trying to line up some cloud host providers so you can install our indexing technology in the cloud for free.
If you use GitHub or Bitbucket and would like to have your private/public Git repositories more searchable, among other things, please send an email to privatebeta@gitsense.com
If you have any technical questions, post them here and I'll try my best to answer them.
I find it hard to get used to these new environments, but I approve the effort put on GitSense.
As a side note, I just released a Chrome Extension[1] that does improve GitHub browsing with a small single change: it adds links to imported packages/modules so you can just click on the name of the module being imported and get access to its documentation or code.
https://github.com/octo-linker/chrome-extension
Might be worthwhile to integrate your changes with it, as there will probably be collisions if both extensions are installed.
When we make the GitSense indexer available, you'll be able to index whatever repositories you want.
Right now there is no practical way to index tens of thousands of repositories because we'd get shutdown pretty quickly for abusing GitHub resources.