4 ms·

GitHub Notiﬁcations: Stars, please

16 points by alanh 16y ago

Groxx 16y ago
Interesting... but I have to disagree. A lot of people would scream bloody-murder if their notifications were automatically marked as read. And if stars / flags are the only organizational option, any power-user will quickly feel the everything-bucket-migraine. Folders / tags are probably a better option there, and would indeed be useful for power-users. By all means, that'd be a useful addition, and can be ignored if one doesn't want to use it. As to the auto-mark-as-read, and possibly everything, how about a plugin? I'm only familiar with Safari's API, but that has storage for settings / data - you could just migrate things to be saved into there, and mark everything automatically.
- alanh 16y ago
  Good point regarding automatically marking as read. Since there is already a “Mark as Read” button, automatically doing so would not required for my ideal solution (as described in the link). I have heard people describe notifications as “broken” for not auto-marking as read, which is why I assumed it was desirable. (That, and since Facebook does it this way, there is a very popular precedent and likely some broken expectations among new GitHub users.) Now regarding labels/folders… this is probably overkill IMO. That’s where GitHub "issues" or various To-do managers, which do have labels, come in.
  - Groxx 16y ago
    I'm not familiar with the "issues"... I'm a very light GitHub user. So, a couple questions for you: Issues? Does GitHub have an API for their notification / message / what-have-you system(s)? What do you use the to-do managers to do? How do they help? Are there any other ways the notifications are "broken"? I ask because I may be interested in making a Safari plugin (which I gather is pretty trivially similar to making a Chrome plugin) to handle a few of the basics. And I'm a UI/UX nut, so how others handle workflow things like this fascinate me.
    - steveklabnik 16y ago
      Issues is GitHub's built in ticket system. Se here, for example: http://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/issues http://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/issues They can be turned on per-project.
mkelly 16y ago
Can anyone enlighten me as to the notification he's receiving? I'm only a light user of github, and 'git pull' and 'git log | less' have always been all the 'notification' mechanism I've needed. I've not dealt with other people wanting to edit the code without having full push access, though.
- kaens 16y ago
  If you follow a project, or a coder, it tells you when things are pushed / edited / commented on. If you post in a comment thread, replies appear as notifications. I'm not sure if he's talking about either or both of those, but it's at least one of them.
- kneath 16y ago
  If you go to https://github.com/account/notifications https://github.com/account/notifications you can see all the notifications you receive. Here's a screencap in case you don't feel like logging in: http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Notification_Center_-_GitHub-20100715-185547.jpg http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Notification_Center_-_Gi... We send you an email and add a message to an inbox-like UI when each of these vents happen.
kneath 16y ago
We plan on eventually revisiting our Inbox in it's entirety. In the meantime, I'd highly suggest using stars to fix the problem. http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/GitHub_Mail_-_Inbox_-_kyle%40github.com-20100715-175516.jpg http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/GitHub_Mail_-_Inbox_-_ky...
- alanh 16y ago
  Awesome news. (For those too lazy to click the link — he is suggesting using Gmail stars for [notification] messages sent by GitHub.)
samratjp 16y ago
Actually I wish I could get growl notifications for the really important ones.
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- jackowayed 16y ago
  It would be cool if they extended the service hooks[1] to handle that. So then you could get the notification by Email, Notifo, Campfire, etc. (And I have some code that goes Notifo->Growl that I need to clean up and document.) Right now the service hooks are just for pushes. If I could say I want IRC to get notified about pull requests, new issues, and comments on issues, want to get emailed about new issues (note that that's a repeat) and comments on my commits, and want to get notified about pull requests (also a repeat), that would be awesome. I'm not sure how many people would want a crazy setup like that, but I could see wanting Campfire/IRC to get notified about more than just pushes. [1] http://github.com/github/github-services http://github.com/github/github-services
jpcx01 16y ago
Github notifications really needs an overhaul. It kicks ass for V1, but it would go way farther if there was project level notification settings. Some projects I only care about commits on X branch, some I don't care about issues on, and some I never want to see notifications on at all (but have it bookmarked in the follow feed for later). Github has been doing mad awesome improvements lately though, so I can't wait to see what they are able to come up with.

16 points by alanh 16y ago

Groxx 16y ago

Interesting... but I have to disagree. A lot of people would scream bloody-murder if their notifications were automatically marked as read. And if stars / flags are the only organizational option, any power-user will quickly feel the everything-bucket-migraine. Folders / tags are probably a better option there, and would indeed be useful for power-users. By all means, that'd be a useful addition, and can be ignored if one doesn't want to use it. As to the auto-mark-as-read, and possibly everything, how about a plugin? I'm only familiar with Safari's API, but that has storage for settings / data - you could just migrate things to be saved into there, and mark everything automatically.

alanh 16y ago
Good point regarding automatically marking as read. Since there is already a “Mark as Read” button, automatically doing so would not required for my ideal solution (as described in the link). I have heard people describe notifications as “broken” for not auto-marking as read, which is why I assumed it was desirable. (That, and since Facebook does it this way, there is a very popular precedent and likely some broken expectations among new GitHub users.) Now regarding labels/folders… this is probably overkill IMO. That’s where GitHub "issues" or various To-do managers, which do have labels, come in.
- Groxx 16y ago
  I'm not familiar with the "issues"... I'm a very light GitHub user. So, a couple questions for you: Issues? Does GitHub have an API for their notification / message / what-have-you system(s)? What do you use the to-do managers to do? How do they help? Are there any other ways the notifications are "broken"? I ask because I may be interested in making a Safari plugin (which I gather is pretty trivially similar to making a Chrome plugin) to handle a few of the basics. And I'm a UI/UX nut, so how others handle workflow things like this fascinate me.
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    Issues is GitHub's built in ticket system. Se here, for example: http://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/issues http://github.com/hacketyhack/hacketyhack/issues They can be turned on per-project.

mkelly 16y ago

Can anyone enlighten me as to the notification he's receiving? I'm only a light user of github, and 'git pull' and 'git log | less' have always been all the 'notification' mechanism I've needed. I've not dealt with other people wanting to edit the code without having full push access, though.

kaens 16y ago
If you follow a project, or a coder, it tells you when things are pushed / edited / commented on. If you post in a comment thread, replies appear as notifications. I'm not sure if he's talking about either or both of those, but it's at least one of them.
kneath 16y ago
If you go to https://github.com/account/notifications https://github.com/account/notifications you can see all the notifications you receive. Here's a screencap in case you don't feel like logging in: http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Notification_Center_-_GitHub-20100715-185547.jpg http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/Notification_Center_-_Gi... We send you an email and add a message to an inbox-like UI when each of these vents happen.

kneath 16y ago

We plan on eventually revisiting our Inbox in it's entirety. In the meantime, I'd highly suggest using stars to fix the problem. http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/GitHub_Mail_-_Inbox_-_kyle%40github.com-20100715-175516.jpg http://share.kyleneath.com/captures/GitHub_Mail_-_Inbox_-_ky...

alanh 16y ago
Awesome news. (For those too lazy to click the link — he is suggesting using Gmail stars for [notification] messages sent by GitHub.)

samratjp 16y ago

Actually I wish I could get growl notifications for the really important ones.

deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
jackowayed 16y ago
It would be cool if they extended the service hooks[1] to handle that. So then you could get the notification by Email, Notifo, Campfire, etc. (And I have some code that goes Notifo->Growl that I need to clean up and document.) Right now the service hooks are just for pushes. If I could say I want IRC to get notified about pull requests, new issues, and comments on issues, want to get emailed about new issues (note that that's a repeat) and comments on my commits, and want to get notified about pull requests (also a repeat), that would be awesome. I'm not sure how many people would want a crazy setup like that, but I could see wanting Campfire/IRC to get notified about more than just pushes. [1] http://github.com/github/github-services http://github.com/github/github-services

jpcx01 16y ago

Github notifications really needs an overhaul. It kicks ass for V1, but it would go way farther if there was project level notification settings. Some projects I only care about commits on X branch, some I don't care about issues on, and some I never want to see notifications on at all (but have it bookmarked in the follow feed for later). Github has been doing mad awesome improvements lately though, so I can't wait to see what they are able to come up with.