How does this compare to Tower? It's not obvious from the website, but I'm guessing is less fully featured. Anyone with experience with both who can comment?
The feature set it comparable, with the biggest missing feature being individual file rollback. Tags and stashes, as well, do not seem to be supported in github for mac. Perhaps I have simply not found them in the interface yet.
In terms of workflow, performing tasks in github for mac is more cumbersome. The gui, while nice, does not fit all that well to a fast git workflow. You must wait for panes to load separately from one another, so one code review and commit may involve loading several panes. This is much different from Tower, which tends to keep most tasks present in the main window. In a dual-monitor setup, Tower works well when occupying a screen, while github for mac would be wasting space if used in that format.
The history browser, too, is quite simplistic. Tower can render commit history in the way that github for mac has chosen to do it, but I prefer the way that gity and others have allowed a history list and commit tree. One thing I like about Tower is the ability to scroll down a commit history and instantly see the diffs of that commit. With github for mac, you must click on a commit and bring up the diff in the whole window -- which seems a symptom of its non-multitasking workflow.
At this point, I could not see myself using this over Tower in any project scope, though this is of course tinged by my experience with working with Tower. It is very nice that github for mac is free, and having more offerings in the space is going to be great for innovation, but I do wish they had taken a different approach with their interface. Perhaps more to like will come of further use.
GitHub.app seems like it's trying to take some of the complexity out of Git for beginners. For example, I'm looking at the "Changes" tab and don't see a distinction between staged and local changes. There's just a "Sync Branch" at the top that presumably does a pull, you don't get to have multiple remotes, just a "primary remote repository". No --rebase on pull, either.
Basically it looks to me like GitHub.app is trying to make common scenarios a lot easier to understand, but you have to go elsewhere for anything even slightly outside the lines. Could be the right tool for getting Git newbies (or even VCS newbies) onto the Git/GitHub wagon, especially for those who don't aspire to ever be Git experts. But heavy Git users, I'm guessing, will not be tempted.
One thing that Tower can do quite well is dealing with multiple remote repositories (e.g. github + heroku). If GitHub for Mac does that as well, I believe I'm going to switch to that.