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Show HN: Gitter – Chat for GitHub

243 points by mydigitalself 13y ago

lazyant 13y ago
I love the source code at the beginning of this page.
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  +1 for finding it :) you should check it out in sublime text in the little preview strip they have on the right column, it looks awesome there.
  - lazyant 13y ago
    job conditioning, I always look at the source code and the GTmetrix (YSlow, Page Speed) of all the "show HN" projects I see
timlindinct 13y ago
Nice one! This is a great repurposing of your existing product.
lewq 13y ago
I initially read this as "GitHub for cats"
mrcactu5 13y ago
it will be great to use this -- when it comes out in a few months. i guess they aren't waiting until its closer to production
chacha102 13y ago
The 'support' button for trou.pe doesn't work. :(
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  How odd, thanks for reporting, will look into it right now. Was working just fine earlier today. You can also visit https://troupe.uservoice.com/ https://troupe.uservoice.com/
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Looks like some Chrome change may have effected the UserVoice widget we use. Would you mind telling me if it works ok for you in Safari if you have it?
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Fixed, looks like UserVoice changed their widget code today and it broke our integration. Thanks ever so much for pointing this out.
conorgil145 13y ago
Looks pretty neat. I went to signup, but then noticed that they require commit access to my public repos. Why do you need this permission to integrate links to the code and similar features? I don't like giving out commit access unless absolutely necessary.
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Hmmm, we shouldn't need that. Will take a look. You can always signup and then revoke the access if you're not comfortable. Thanks for pointing out.
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  That's the default lowest level of oAuth access and it's just read-only.
tomtheengineer 13y ago
If you ever want to integrate real-time video chat as well, send us a note at vLine: https://vline.com https://vline.com. We actually have what we call a "GitHub identity provider" (https://vline.com/developer/docs/getting_started https://vline.com/developer/docs/getting_started) that should make it really easy. We used that to build GitTogether (https://gittogether.com https://gittogether.com), which is a similar concept to this: text chat and video chat with people you follow plus members of your teams and organizations.
mydigitalself 13y ago
We've got a lot of the parts of this already built, just not packaged in this format. We're trying to see how much support there would be for a product like this. If we get a lot of "signups" we'll get cracking immediately. Comments/feedback more than welcome. Thanks in advance for your support.
- odonnellryan 13y ago
  This is awesome. I can see this being massively useful. Who wants to use GMail for a chat? Coming from someone who uses Github with a few people, this would be great. I'd even pay for it if our project was more than a hobby at this point.
  - mydigitalself 13y ago
    Thanks for the support. We'll be absolutely sure to have a useful free tier as well as a paid offering.
    - odonnellryan 13y ago
      Thanks! That's what I meant to imply, but I didn't know how to phrase it.
andrewnez 13y ago
Looks great, just needs some emojis and hubot integration and I'm sold!
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Oh, we'll have awesome emotigifs(tm?) and will certainly look at baking Hubot right in. Thanks for your feebdack.
aram 13y ago
Signed up immediately. Very promising, especially if the history stays up there for anyone who joins the "repo" discussion later on. This could be really important for bigger projects where new/significant features should be discussed openly. This way the information stays attached to the repo and others can refer to it later on. Looking forward to seeing it in action!
- trevorah 13y ago
  Dev here! Yeah, we've been making www.trou.pe for while and have just added some github hooks after some user requests. We are just curious to see how far people want github integration to go...
- bbthorson 13y ago
  We built github chat and it's in production http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos please check it out and give us some feedback
Artemis2 13y ago
"Available everywhere that has internets" And my Windows Phone? :(
- trevorah 13y ago
  There's always the webapp :)
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Ah, yes on that too! Sorry, didn't mean to leave you guys out.
janerik 13y ago
I don't really like the idea of signing up with my github account. But I like the idea of Gitter. One small improvement: Link the "@GitChat" on the confirmation page to the twitter account ;)
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Hey, thanks for the improvement. Done. Shipped like squirrel. Why don't you like the idea of signing up with GitHub? Feedback will be very valuable for us, thanks.
  - pseut 13y ago
    Not the parent, but I'm reluctant to give a website access to an account I care about just for a trial. If I know that I want to use your service, sure, but not if I just want to casually evaluate it.
    - adamcanady 13y ago
      I agree with this, but it's better than the alternative of signing up for a brand new username / password combo! What would you have in mind instead?
      - corobo 13y ago
        (Not parent or parent's parent) Email and password. It's not really better to be fair I can give a new service a disposable email address, I don't have a disposable Github/Facebook/Twitter/etc account. Not even a shred of a chance of me testing something if you're requesting anything other than the most basic of read-only permissions too
        username223 13y ago
        "I don't have a disposable Github/Facebook/Twitter/etc account." Now there's a business idea: Mailinator for shady sites harvesting "social" accounts.
dreamdu5t 13y ago
Chat apps come and go... and there I am on IRC. I hang out with lots of people on github there. Why would I use this over IRC with the client of my choice? Build an IRC client that integrates with GitHub, or extensions for Adium to handle github URL's. Or maybe GitHub could offer authorization through XMPP. Why should I have to use a separate client when I already have Facebook, IRC, XMPP, etc. all managed from the same place?
buf 13y ago
Beautiful, but unfortunately it wouldn't be appropriate for my non-technical teammates, so I cannot see it beating out hipchat. I love the concept though and I can see this being the tool of choice for technical teams.
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Hey there. We'll absolutely consider how non-technical folks can engage with this. Our current product, Troupe (http://trou.pe http://trou.pe) is more along these lines, with GitHub webhooks integration. We may look to fuse the concepts so that it works brilliantly for both the developers and the rest of the company too.
- trevorah 13y ago
  Yeah, that barrier is a tough one to overcome. We've found that having an easy entry point (nothing to install, one click signup etc.) lowers the barrier a bit. Also having some kind of free tier could always be an advantage over hipchat...
  - graue 13y ago
    HipChat also has a free tier (for teams of 5 or smaller). https://www.hipchat.com/pricing https://www.hipchat.com/pricing
    - trevorah 13y ago
      Good point. The problem with a tier limited by the number of people is that you take away one of the best parts of a free chat service. Being able to freely invite _anyone_ into a conversation really opens up what you can do.
nichol4s 13y ago
Looks really interesting, you guys should take a look at www.surfly.com. With Surfly in the mix you would not just be able to chat about things but also show people around. Also, I couldn't find any contact info. :(
- trevorah 13y ago
  @gitchat on twitter for now.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- CatsoCatsoCatso 13y ago
  This led me to view the page source and zoom out to see what the clusterfuck at the top was. Hah. Nice easter egg OP.
  - mydigitalself 13y ago
    You win the prize! :) Was hoping someone would find that. It looks awesome in Sublime text edit in the preview panel on the top right.
davman 13y ago
Not directly related to your product, but I always wonder why, with soft launches like this where you gauge interest, why not make the "interest" count public? How many people have you captured? That being said, I've wanted this idea for a while, so I signed up straight away.
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  That's a great idea, wish we'd thought of it. We'll share the learnings afterwards on @GitChat.
mfenniak 13y ago
Hm, "signing up" by providing read-only OAuth access to my GitHub account is... fascinating. :-) Very clever way to make signups easy, relevant to the interest you're trying to gauge, and gather far more information about me than just my e-mail address (eg. my activity level on GitHub, the type of projects I'm involved in).
j-hernandez 13y ago
Another immediate signup. Would like to echo @davman's comment about showing the interest count. It would be interesting to watch the needle, so to speak. A +1 for Hubot integration as well. At any rate, best of luck! Amazing effort.
daGrevis 13y ago
Is it open-sourced?
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Hi! We're using a huge amount of open source components ourselves and are actively contributing back to those projects. James Coglan's Faye is a great example of this where we've been working with James to get it to V1. The approach we'll take for our own work is certainly to open source some of the components rather than the entire system. We're big believers in giving back, but at the same time we ned to protect our own business.
markrickert 13y ago
Error: failed to fetch user profile (status: 403 data: {"message":"Maximum number of login attempts exceeded","documentation_url":"http://developer.github.com/v3"} http://developer.github.com/v3"}) at Strategy.userProfile (/opt/gitter/landing-app/node_modules/passport-github/lib/passport-github/strategy.js:90:28) at passBackControl (/opt/gitter/landing-app/node_modules/passport-github/node_modules/passport-oauth/node_modules/oauth/lib/oauth2.js:105:9) at IncomingMessage.exports.OAuth2._executeRequest.request.on.callbackCalled (/opt/gitter/landing-app/node_modules/passport-github/node_modules/passport-oauth/node_modules/oauth/lib/oauth2.js:124:7) at IncomingMessage.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:126:20) at IncomingMessage._emitEnd (http.js:366:10) at HTTPParser.parserOnMessageComplete [as onMessageComplete] (http.js:149:23) at CleartextStream.socketOnData [as ondata] (http.js:1472:20) at CleartextStream.CryptoStream._push (tls.js:544:27) at SecurePair.cycle (tls.js:898:20) at EncryptedStream.CryptoStream.write (tls.js:285:13) at Socket.ondata (stream.js:38:26) Guess it's built with node ;) After pressing the button again, it gave me the confirmation message.
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Yes, node node node! :) Um, thanks for pointing this out, will take a look at it, we may have blown through the rate limit.
  - babby 13y ago
    Isnt echoing errors like that a security issue? Im not implying it necessarly is, because it's obviously conveniently useful for debugging.
    - elisee 13y ago
      Yup, they should log / e-mail themselves the error messages when in production rather than displaying them, sensitive info might leak plus stacktrace aren't very friendly. Looks like they might have left the connect.errorHandler() dev middleware (http://www.senchalabs.org/connect/errorHandler.html http://www.senchalabs.org/connect/errorHandler.html) plugged into their app.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
nnd 13y ago
The landing page looks really slick. I was wondering, how did you create the design for it? I'm a programmer and my web design skills are limited to installing bootstrap, and I'm always fascinated, how would you come up with right color/font/layout matching
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Hi. Thanks so much. I do everything "in the browser" these days. No Photoshop, just straight HTML/CSS/JS in Sublime Text. That way the site starts to feel alive pretty quickly and then I just tweak stuff around until I'm happy with it. Colours... Sometimes I use http://flatuicolors.com/ http://flatuicolors.com/ as a starting point and then tweak it from there. Also keep looking around at stuff on Dribble/Behance/Pinterest for inspiration. Some good guys to follow on Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/robklaiss/uiux/ http://www.pinterest.com/robklaiss/uiux/ http://www.pinterest.com/alexhyett/ui-ux-inspiration/ http://www.pinterest.com/alexhyett/ui-ux-inspiration/ http://www.pinterest.com/wkk711/mobile-ui-ux/ http://www.pinterest.com/wkk711/mobile-ui-ux/ Hope that's helpful.
  - aeon10 13y ago
    Hello, Would you mind sharing about front end libraries (js, css) you've used. The interface is beautiful and efficient. I'd love to hear a bit more about it.
    - mydigitalself 13y ago
      Thanks for much for the compliment, you made my day. There's not much to say really. It's just pretty vanilla jQuery and then I code the CSS/HTML by hand. I use a few Bootstrap components, but where possibly I try to craft everything myself. I think that helps to keep it simple, if you start throwing a lot of components together you end up with a mess rather than having to put the effort in yourself and, as your time is a precious resource, you think more about what's important and what's not. Sorry, I know that's not very helpful!
      - 13y ago
JamesAdir 13y ago
Great work! Could you share about what stack/technologies used to build it? Trying to learn how to choose the best platform for each solution.
- trevorah 13y ago
  At the moment we have node + express + faye for rest api/streaming. The web front end is currently built with backbone, less and a sprinkling of bootstrap.
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
A perfect headline / product for HN. Very nicely done Rick Rolling.
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Thanks, was hoping someone would find that easter egg. Got to have a little fun along the journey!
stigi 13y ago
One question: After signing up for Gitter I checked out Trou.pe. But even without signing up for Trou.pe it already knew my gravatar & was able to suggest me usernames (including my full name) when going to http://trou.pe http://trou.pe. How's that possible?
- suprememoocow 13y ago
  When you perform the OAuth signup via GitHub, GitHub provides us with your name username, etc. Then, if you click the link to signup with Troupe, we create a Troupe account for you, pre-populated with your details, so that you don't need to enter them again. Hope this helps! (I'm one of the devs)
  - stigi 13y ago
    So you're pushing my information between two different services. Both of which happen to be provided by the same organization. It's kinda convenient, but still does not feel quite right :(
    - babby 13y ago
      I concur, doesn't feel right. I think at the very least, have a message saying "This information was shared when you did X" so it's at least explicit. Possibly just not at all; methinks the github crowd, unlike the facebook crowd, are sufficiently privacy sentient.
      - mydigitalself 13y ago
        That wasn't the intention at all, it was more to save you having to type those details in again. Sorry if you felt wronged by it. We're developers ourselves and value our privacy too/
        Killswitch 13y ago
        Please make it so we can delete our accounts. I signed in for gitter because I like what I read and wanted to be on the waiting list, but when I got the message saying about Trou.pe I was curious to see what it was, not sign up. That's not cool, and now I'm signed up for some site I don't even know what does... I looked around after being force signed up and STILL don't know what it is. Now I can't delete it without going to Github and de-authorizing the actual account I did want. ಠ_ಠ
naiquevin 13y ago
Just tried signing up with github and got the message - "Gitter isn't ready yet. If we get enough support, we will launch this in a few months. Help spread the word by Tweeting about us and follow @GitChat for updates." From the other comments here, it looks like people are able to try out a demo or something. What am I missing?
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Hi. No it's purely testing a concept. Lean product development process in full swing. We tried to make that clear in the text above the signup button, sorry if we mislead you that wasn't the intention. We're trying to gauge interest before investing heavily in the product.
  - estel 13y ago
    I think the "Sign up" copy on the button might be a bit misleading, because as a user I'm not really signing up for anything...
podviaznikov 13y ago
My Hackathon GitChat project from one year ago: http://chat.gitrun.com/ http://chat.gitrun.com/. Source: https://github.com/gitrun/chat https://github.com/gitrun/chat
rmccue 13y ago
I want to pay money for this. A chat service with built-in GitHub integration including issue and file referencing sounds like a fantastic tool for teams building using GitHub. Any chance you can use an actual Kickstarter instead so I can throw money at you? :)
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  As long as it's not Pound coins. Those things are heavy! Thanks for the feedback. Our Clickstarter (tm?) is doing quite nicely. I don't think we'll need to Kickstarter it, we've actually built a lot of the tech anyway and could put this together pretty quickly and start charging too.
  - baudehlo 13y ago
    Would love to chat to you directly about all this. Your contact details are hard to find!
    - mydigitalself 13y ago
      Is that Matt of Haraka fame?
      - baudehlo 13y ago
        Yes, it's on my profile page here
    - mydigitalself 13y ago
      mike at troupe dot co btw
  - hoverbear 13y ago
    Any chance that Gitter will be on github so we can help out with it?
  - hoverbear 13y ago
    Any chance that Gitter will be on github so we can help out with it?
nakovet 13y ago
From the screenshot with localhost on location bar I thought it would be self hosted. EDIT: The screenshot was updated. ;D
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Ah no, that was just shotted off my local development environment.
dcaunt 13y ago
A lot of comments here are saying things like "I wouldn't be able to persuade my team/non-technical colleagues to use this instead of HipChat". Surely one the most exciting uses for Gitter is discussion on open-source repos, where you aren't already communicating with repo collaborators?
- trevorah 13y ago
  true, but it would be fantastic to merge those two cultures together. Having non technical people involved in open source projects is a good thing, and it is something that we are trying to encourage.
  - dcaunt 13y ago
    Absolutely, and I wish you all the best. Look forward to using it!
fhd2 13y ago
(Edit: I initially thought this was _from_ GitHub. Apparently it's not, so please disregard the nagging below. It is a cool idea, but if GitHub did this, I'd have different expectations.) I'd be all over this if it was an IRC server. Most big projects already have an IRC channel on FreeNode, so this'd be a natural fit: Provide an IRC server with a channel for each project, provide a free web client for this server with the GitHub-goodies. But alas, apparently it's just another proprietary chat network.
- davidw 13y ago
  I think with some hacking you could offer a bot that did some of this, perhaps together with client-side plugins.
- suprememoocow 13y ago
  Actually, FreeNode integration is something we've discussed quite a bit and could well end up in the product if there is enough interest in us putting it in. FreeNode is an incredible source of information and it would be a pity not to use it.
  - gault8121 13y ago
    This would be the killer feature to add. Users should be able to communicate to freenode, and vice versa, while being able to do all of the management functions.
bazzargh 13y ago
You guys should offer this for github enterprise. Any form of integration would also be nice (an IRC or XMPP bridge) because I don't want yet another chat client on my desktop, and alerts from web clients don't cut it... ...slightly offtopic, on the alerts: chrome's rich notifications pop under apple's desktop notifications, and neither let me capture the notification and have the system voice read it to me rather than flash up in a corner that I'm not looking at. But campfire's in-browser notifications are the worst of all, some random tab beeping when I have 100 open.
- trevorah 13y ago
  Yeah, github enterprise definitely makes sense, and it is something that we will look into. Chrome's notifications since v28 kinda suck. Browser notifications have always been difficult, and in fact our www.trou.pe native app was originally just a toolbar app to solve this problem.
sberder 13y ago
How long will it take to be a usable product? I might be interested and need to know if I should keep looking around or just wait a bit.
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Take a look at our current product, it's not directly tied to GitHub, but has webhook integration (with BitBucket, Travis, Jenkins too). www.trou.pe We'll need to sweat some details on Gitter, so hard to say on the timing. We may fuse the two concepts together, so it will be more about product-related decisions than development time as we have a lot of the code already. Feel free to give us feedback on Troupe so we can loop that into the future direction of this product.
coherentpony 13y ago
Will it be open source?
cookrn 13y ago
A wonderful chat service called Kato offers a very similar chat <=> github integration http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos
atmosx 13y ago
Great great app :-) Impressive!
monokrome 13y ago
Show HN: Something else that isn't done yet, but wants access to my accounts for who knows what reason.
vlad 13y ago
This looks like it was influenced by the Hub, a Node Knockout project with a landing page created by high school students that's been picking up steam on Twitter since last weekend. http://nodeknockout.com/teams/team-name-goes-here http://nodeknockout.com/teams/team-name-goes-here Both landing pages seem nice, and looks like a great way to test the idea out!
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  We hadn't seen this at all, so wasn't part of the influence to be honest. Trying to check it out now, but it's hanging on signup :(
  - RossPenman 13y ago
    Hi! I'm one of the developers of Hub. We've been having some issues with GitHub rate limiting, but that should have reset now, so if you still want to try it out, it should work for you now. :)
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
  - lennykhazan 13y ago
    Sorry to hear that :( I'm also one of the devs. If you are still having issues with authenticating you can check out a video and description about our service at http://nodeknockout.com/teams/team-name-goes-here http://nodeknockout.com/teams/team-name-goes-here
- mxsscott 13y ago
  You can vote for the NodeKnockout project here by clicking the top right vote button: http://team-name-goes-here.2013.nodeknockout.com/ http://team-name-goes-here.2013.nodeknockout.com/ I bet RossPenman, LennyKhazan and the others in the team would love your votes.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
rohamg 13y ago
Very interesting, I'm looking forward to checking out the product! We use GitHub exclusively for everything; even our non-technical team-members leverage GitHub for sales, HR, marketing, blog post writing.. You name it. We did have to build a product to make this easier on ourselves [1], into which we've been resisting integrating chat. Chat is the only non-GitHub piece of our workflow, Gitter looks promising! [1] http://zenhub.io http://zenhub.io
- bbthorson 13y ago
  We have this in production and would love your feedback http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos
bbthorson 13y ago
We've already built this at Kato http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos

243 points by mydigitalself 13y ago

lazyant 13y ago

I love the source code at the beginning of this page.

mydigitalself 13y ago
+1 for finding it :) you should check it out in sublime text in the little preview strip they have on the right column, it looks awesome there.
- lazyant 13y ago
  job conditioning, I always look at the source code and the GTmetrix (YSlow, Page Speed) of all the "show HN" projects I see

timlindinct 13y ago

Nice one! This is a great repurposing of your existing product.

lewq 13y ago

I initially read this as "GitHub for cats"

mrcactu5 13y ago

it will be great to use this -- when it comes out in a few months. i guess they aren't waiting until its closer to production

chacha102 13y ago

The 'support' button for trou.pe doesn't work. :(

mydigitalself 13y ago
How odd, thanks for reporting, will look into it right now. Was working just fine earlier today. You can also visit https://troupe.uservoice.com/ https://troupe.uservoice.com/
mydigitalself 13y ago
Looks like some Chrome change may have effected the UserVoice widget we use. Would you mind telling me if it works ok for you in Safari if you have it?
mydigitalself 13y ago
Fixed, looks like UserVoice changed their widget code today and it broke our integration. Thanks ever so much for pointing this out.

conorgil145 13y ago

Looks pretty neat. I went to signup, but then noticed that they require commit access to my public repos. Why do you need this permission to integrate links to the code and similar features? I don't like giving out commit access unless absolutely necessary.

mydigitalself 13y ago
Hmmm, we shouldn't need that. Will take a look. You can always signup and then revoke the access if you're not comfortable. Thanks for pointing out.
mydigitalself 13y ago
That's the default lowest level of oAuth access and it's just read-only.

tomtheengineer 13y ago

If you ever want to integrate real-time video chat as well, send us a note at vLine: https://vline.com https://vline.com. We actually have what we call a "GitHub identity provider" (https://vline.com/developer/docs/getting_started https://vline.com/developer/docs/getting_started) that should make it really easy. We used that to build GitTogether (https://gittogether.com https://gittogether.com), which is a similar concept to this: text chat and video chat with people you follow plus members of your teams and organizations.

mydigitalself 13y ago

We've got a lot of the parts of this already built, just not packaged in this format. We're trying to see how much support there would be for a product like this. If we get a lot of "signups" we'll get cracking immediately. Comments/feedback more than welcome. Thanks in advance for your support.

odonnellryan 13y ago
This is awesome. I can see this being massively useful. Who wants to use GMail for a chat? Coming from someone who uses Github with a few people, this would be great. I'd even pay for it if our project was more than a hobby at this point.
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  Thanks for the support. We'll be absolutely sure to have a useful free tier as well as a paid offering.
  - odonnellryan 13y ago
    Thanks! That's what I meant to imply, but I didn't know how to phrase it.

andrewnez 13y ago

Looks great, just needs some emojis and hubot integration and I'm sold!

mydigitalself 13y ago
Oh, we'll have awesome emotigifs(tm?) and will certainly look at baking Hubot right in. Thanks for your feebdack.

aram 13y ago

Signed up immediately. Very promising, especially if the history stays up there for anyone who joins the "repo" discussion later on. This could be really important for bigger projects where new/significant features should be discussed openly. This way the information stays attached to the repo and others can refer to it later on. Looking forward to seeing it in action!

trevorah 13y ago
Dev here! Yeah, we've been making www.trou.pe for while and have just added some github hooks after some user requests. We are just curious to see how far people want github integration to go...
bbthorson 13y ago
We built github chat and it's in production http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos please check it out and give us some feedback

Artemis2 13y ago

"Available everywhere that has internets" And my Windows Phone? :(

trevorah 13y ago
There's always the webapp :)
mydigitalself 13y ago
Ah, yes on that too! Sorry, didn't mean to leave you guys out.

janerik 13y ago

I don't really like the idea of signing up with my github account. But I like the idea of Gitter. One small improvement: Link the "@GitChat" on the confirmation page to the twitter account ;)

mydigitalself 13y ago
Hey, thanks for the improvement. Done. Shipped like squirrel. Why don't you like the idea of signing up with GitHub? Feedback will be very valuable for us, thanks.
- pseut 13y ago
  Not the parent, but I'm reluctant to give a website access to an account I care about just for a trial. If I know that I want to use your service, sure, but not if I just want to casually evaluate it.
  - adamcanady 13y ago
    I agree with this, but it's better than the alternative of signing up for a brand new username / password combo! What would you have in mind instead?
    - corobo 13y ago
      (Not parent or parent's parent) Email and password. It's not really better to be fair I can give a new service a disposable email address, I don't have a disposable Github/Facebook/Twitter/etc account. Not even a shred of a chance of me testing something if you're requesting anything other than the most basic of read-only permissions too
      - username223 13y ago
        "I don't have a disposable Github/Facebook/Twitter/etc account." Now there's a business idea: Mailinator for shady sites harvesting "social" accounts.

dreamdu5t 13y ago

Chat apps come and go... and there I am on IRC. I hang out with lots of people on github there. Why would I use this over IRC with the client of my choice? Build an IRC client that integrates with GitHub, or extensions for Adium to handle github URL's. Or maybe GitHub could offer authorization through XMPP. Why should I have to use a separate client when I already have Facebook, IRC, XMPP, etc. all managed from the same place?

buf 13y ago

Beautiful, but unfortunately it wouldn't be appropriate for my non-technical teammates, so I cannot see it beating out hipchat. I love the concept though and I can see this being the tool of choice for technical teams.

mydigitalself 13y ago
Hey there. We'll absolutely consider how non-technical folks can engage with this. Our current product, Troupe (http://trou.pe http://trou.pe) is more along these lines, with GitHub webhooks integration. We may look to fuse the concepts so that it works brilliantly for both the developers and the rest of the company too.
trevorah 13y ago
Yeah, that barrier is a tough one to overcome. We've found that having an easy entry point (nothing to install, one click signup etc.) lowers the barrier a bit. Also having some kind of free tier could always be an advantage over hipchat...
- graue 13y ago
  HipChat also has a free tier (for teams of 5 or smaller). https://www.hipchat.com/pricing https://www.hipchat.com/pricing
  - trevorah 13y ago
    Good point. The problem with a tier limited by the number of people is that you take away one of the best parts of a free chat service. Being able to freely invite _anyone_ into a conversation really opens up what you can do.

nichol4s 13y ago

Looks really interesting, you guys should take a look at www.surfly.com. With Surfly in the mix you would not just be able to chat about things but also show people around. Also, I couldn't find any contact info. :(

trevorah 13y ago
@gitchat on twitter for now.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

CatsoCatsoCatso 13y ago
This led me to view the page source and zoom out to see what the clusterfuck at the top was. Hah. Nice easter egg OP.
- mydigitalself 13y ago
  You win the prize! :) Was hoping someone would find that. It looks awesome in Sublime text edit in the preview panel on the top right.

davman 13y ago

Not directly related to your product, but I always wonder why, with soft launches like this where you gauge interest, why not make the "interest" count public? How many people have you captured? That being said, I've wanted this idea for a while, so I signed up straight away.

mydigitalself 13y ago
That's a great idea, wish we'd thought of it. We'll share the learnings afterwards on @GitChat.

mfenniak 13y ago

Hm, "signing up" by providing read-only OAuth access to my GitHub account is... fascinating. :-) Very clever way to make signups easy, relevant to the interest you're trying to gauge, and gather far more information about me than just my e-mail address (eg. my activity level on GitHub, the type of projects I'm involved in).

j-hernandez 13y ago

Another immediate signup. Would like to echo @davman's comment about showing the interest count. It would be interesting to watch the needle, so to speak. A +1 for Hubot integration as well. At any rate, best of luck! Amazing effort.

daGrevis 13y ago

Is it open-sourced?

mydigitalself 13y ago
Hi! We're using a huge amount of open source components ourselves and are actively contributing back to those projects. James Coglan's Faye is a great example of this where we've been working with James to get it to V1. The approach we'll take for our own work is certainly to open source some of the components rather than the entire system. We're big believers in giving back, but at the same time we ned to protect our own business.

markrickert 13y ago

Error: failed to fetch user profile (status: 403 data: {"message":"Maximum number of login attempts exceeded","documentation_url":"http://developer.github.com/v3"} http://developer.github.com/v3"}) at Strategy.userProfile (/opt/gitter/landing-app/node_modules/passport-github/lib/passport-github/strategy.js:90:28) at passBackControl (/opt/gitter/landing-app/node_modules/passport-github/node_modules/passport-oauth/node_modules/oauth/lib/oauth2.js:105:9) at IncomingMessage.exports.OAuth2._executeRequest.request.on.callbackCalled (/opt/gitter/landing-app/node_modules/passport-github/node_modules/passport-oauth/node_modules/oauth/lib/oauth2.js:124:7) at IncomingMessage.EventEmitter.emit (events.js:126:20) at IncomingMessage._emitEnd (http.js:366:10) at HTTPParser.parserOnMessageComplete [as onMessageComplete] (http.js:149:23) at CleartextStream.socketOnData [as ondata] (http.js:1472:20) at CleartextStream.CryptoStream._push (tls.js:544:27) at SecurePair.cycle (tls.js:898:20) at EncryptedStream.CryptoStream.write (tls.js:285:13) at Socket.ondata (stream.js:38:26) Guess it's built with node ;) After pressing the button again, it gave me the confirmation message.

mydigitalself 13y ago
Yes, node node node! :) Um, thanks for pointing this out, will take a look at it, we may have blown through the rate limit.
- babby 13y ago
  Isnt echoing errors like that a security issue? Im not implying it necessarly is, because it's obviously conveniently useful for debugging.
  - elisee 13y ago
    Yup, they should log / e-mail themselves the error messages when in production rather than displaying them, sensitive info might leak plus stacktrace aren't very friendly. Looks like they might have left the connect.errorHandler() dev middleware (http://www.senchalabs.org/connect/errorHandler.html http://www.senchalabs.org/connect/errorHandler.html) plugged into their app.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

nnd 13y ago

The landing page looks really slick. I was wondering, how did you create the design for it? I'm a programmer and my web design skills are limited to installing bootstrap, and I'm always fascinated, how would you come up with right color/font/layout matching

mydigitalself 13y ago
Hi. Thanks so much. I do everything "in the browser" these days. No Photoshop, just straight HTML/CSS/JS in Sublime Text. That way the site starts to feel alive pretty quickly and then I just tweak stuff around until I'm happy with it. Colours... Sometimes I use http://flatuicolors.com/ http://flatuicolors.com/ as a starting point and then tweak it from there. Also keep looking around at stuff on Dribble/Behance/Pinterest for inspiration. Some good guys to follow on Pinterest: http://www.pinterest.com/robklaiss/uiux/ http://www.pinterest.com/robklaiss/uiux/ http://www.pinterest.com/alexhyett/ui-ux-inspiration/ http://www.pinterest.com/alexhyett/ui-ux-inspiration/ http://www.pinterest.com/wkk711/mobile-ui-ux/ http://www.pinterest.com/wkk711/mobile-ui-ux/ Hope that's helpful.
- aeon10 13y ago
  Hello, Would you mind sharing about front end libraries (js, css) you've used. The interface is beautiful and efficient. I'd love to hear a bit more about it.
  - mydigitalself 13y ago
    Thanks for much for the compliment, you made my day. There's not much to say really. It's just pretty vanilla jQuery and then I code the CSS/HTML by hand. I use a few Bootstrap components, but where possibly I try to craft everything myself. I think that helps to keep it simple, if you start throwing a lot of components together you end up with a mess rather than having to put the effort in yourself and, as your time is a precious resource, you think more about what's important and what's not. Sorry, I know that's not very helpful!
    - 13y ago

JamesAdir 13y ago

Great work! Could you share about what stack/technologies used to build it? Trying to learn how to choose the best platform for each solution.

trevorah 13y ago
At the moment we have node + express + faye for rest api/streaming. The web front end is currently built with backbone, less and a sprinkling of bootstrap.

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

A perfect headline / product for HN. Very nicely done Rick Rolling.

mydigitalself 13y ago
Thanks, was hoping someone would find that easter egg. Got to have a little fun along the journey!

stigi 13y ago

One question: After signing up for Gitter I checked out Trou.pe. But even without signing up for Trou.pe it already knew my gravatar & was able to suggest me usernames (including my full name) when going to http://trou.pe http://trou.pe. How's that possible?

suprememoocow 13y ago
When you perform the OAuth signup via GitHub, GitHub provides us with your name username, etc. Then, if you click the link to signup with Troupe, we create a Troupe account for you, pre-populated with your details, so that you don't need to enter them again. Hope this helps! (I'm one of the devs)
- stigi 13y ago
  So you're pushing my information between two different services. Both of which happen to be provided by the same organization. It's kinda convenient, but still does not feel quite right :(
  - babby 13y ago
    I concur, doesn't feel right. I think at the very least, have a message saying "This information was shared when you did X" so it's at least explicit. Possibly just not at all; methinks the github crowd, unlike the facebook crowd, are sufficiently privacy sentient.
    - mydigitalself 13y ago
      That wasn't the intention at all, it was more to save you having to type those details in again. Sorry if you felt wronged by it. We're developers ourselves and value our privacy too/
      - Killswitch 13y ago
        Please make it so we can delete our accounts. I signed in for gitter because I like what I read and wanted to be on the waiting list, but when I got the message saying about Trou.pe I was curious to see what it was, not sign up. That's not cool, and now I'm signed up for some site I don't even know what does... I looked around after being force signed up and STILL don't know what it is. Now I can't delete it without going to Github and de-authorizing the actual account I did want. ಠ_ಠ

naiquevin 13y ago

Just tried signing up with github and got the message - "Gitter isn't ready yet. If we get enough support, we will launch this in a few months. Help spread the word by Tweeting about us and follow @GitChat for updates." From the other comments here, it looks like people are able to try out a demo or something. What am I missing?

mydigitalself 13y ago
Hi. No it's purely testing a concept. Lean product development process in full swing. We tried to make that clear in the text above the signup button, sorry if we mislead you that wasn't the intention. We're trying to gauge interest before investing heavily in the product.
- estel 13y ago
  I think the "Sign up" copy on the button might be a bit misleading, because as a user I'm not really signing up for anything...

podviaznikov 13y ago

My Hackathon GitChat project from one year ago: http://chat.gitrun.com/ http://chat.gitrun.com/. Source: https://github.com/gitrun/chat https://github.com/gitrun/chat

rmccue 13y ago

I want to pay money for this. A chat service with built-in GitHub integration including issue and file referencing sounds like a fantastic tool for teams building using GitHub. Any chance you can use an actual Kickstarter instead so I can throw money at you? :)

mydigitalself 13y ago
As long as it's not Pound coins. Those things are heavy! Thanks for the feedback. Our Clickstarter (tm?) is doing quite nicely. I don't think we'll need to Kickstarter it, we've actually built a lot of the tech anyway and could put this together pretty quickly and start charging too.
- baudehlo 13y ago
  Would love to chat to you directly about all this. Your contact details are hard to find!
  - mydigitalself 13y ago
    Is that Matt of Haraka fame?
    - baudehlo 13y ago
      Yes, it's on my profile page here
  - mydigitalself 13y ago
    mike at troupe dot co btw
- hoverbear 13y ago
  Any chance that Gitter will be on github so we can help out with it?
- hoverbear 13y ago
  Any chance that Gitter will be on github so we can help out with it?

nakovet 13y ago

From the screenshot with localhost on location bar I thought it would be self hosted. EDIT: The screenshot was updated. ;D

mydigitalself 13y ago
Ah no, that was just shotted off my local development environment.

dcaunt 13y ago

A lot of comments here are saying things like "I wouldn't be able to persuade my team/non-technical colleagues to use this instead of HipChat". Surely one the most exciting uses for Gitter is discussion on open-source repos, where you aren't already communicating with repo collaborators?

trevorah 13y ago
true, but it would be fantastic to merge those two cultures together. Having non technical people involved in open source projects is a good thing, and it is something that we are trying to encourage.
- dcaunt 13y ago
  Absolutely, and I wish you all the best. Look forward to using it!

fhd2 13y ago

(Edit: I initially thought this was _from_ GitHub. Apparently it's not, so please disregard the nagging below. It is a cool idea, but if GitHub did this, I'd have different expectations.) I'd be all over this if it was an IRC server. Most big projects already have an IRC channel on FreeNode, so this'd be a natural fit: Provide an IRC server with a channel for each project, provide a free web client for this server with the GitHub-goodies. But alas, apparently it's just another proprietary chat network.

davidw 13y ago
I think with some hacking you could offer a bot that did some of this, perhaps together with client-side plugins.
suprememoocow 13y ago
Actually, FreeNode integration is something we've discussed quite a bit and could well end up in the product if there is enough interest in us putting it in. FreeNode is an incredible source of information and it would be a pity not to use it.
- gault8121 13y ago
  This would be the killer feature to add. Users should be able to communicate to freenode, and vice versa, while being able to do all of the management functions.

bazzargh 13y ago

You guys should offer this for github enterprise. Any form of integration would also be nice (an IRC or XMPP bridge) because I don't want yet another chat client on my desktop, and alerts from web clients don't cut it... ...slightly offtopic, on the alerts: chrome's rich notifications pop under apple's desktop notifications, and neither let me capture the notification and have the system voice read it to me rather than flash up in a corner that I'm not looking at. But campfire's in-browser notifications are the worst of all, some random tab beeping when I have 100 open.

trevorah 13y ago
Yeah, github enterprise definitely makes sense, and it is something that we will look into. Chrome's notifications since v28 kinda suck. Browser notifications have always been difficult, and in fact our www.trou.pe native app was originally just a toolbar app to solve this problem.

sberder 13y ago

How long will it take to be a usable product? I might be interested and need to know if I should keep looking around or just wait a bit.

mydigitalself 13y ago
Take a look at our current product, it's not directly tied to GitHub, but has webhook integration (with BitBucket, Travis, Jenkins too). www.trou.pe We'll need to sweat some details on Gitter, so hard to say on the timing. We may fuse the two concepts together, so it will be more about product-related decisions than development time as we have a lot of the code already. Feel free to give us feedback on Troupe so we can loop that into the future direction of this product.

coherentpony 13y ago

Will it be open source?

cookrn 13y ago

A wonderful chat service called Kato offers a very similar chat <=> github integration http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos

atmosx 13y ago

Great great app :-) Impressive!

monokrome 13y ago

Show HN: Something else that isn't done yet, but wants access to my accounts for who knows what reason.

vlad 13y ago

This looks like it was influenced by the Hub, a Node Knockout project with a landing page created by high school students that's been picking up steam on Twitter since last weekend. http://nodeknockout.com/teams/team-name-goes-here http://nodeknockout.com/teams/team-name-goes-here Both landing pages seem nice, and looks like a great way to test the idea out!

mydigitalself 13y ago
We hadn't seen this at all, so wasn't part of the influence to be honest. Trying to check it out now, but it's hanging on signup :(
- RossPenman 13y ago
  Hi! I'm one of the developers of Hub. We've been having some issues with GitHub rate limiting, but that should have reset now, so if you still want to try it out, it should work for you now. :)
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- lennykhazan 13y ago
  Sorry to hear that :( I'm also one of the devs. If you are still having issues with authenticating you can check out a video and description about our service at http://nodeknockout.com/teams/team-name-goes-here http://nodeknockout.com/teams/team-name-goes-here
mxsscott 13y ago
You can vote for the NodeKnockout project here by clicking the top right vote button: http://team-name-goes-here.2013.nodeknockout.com/ http://team-name-goes-here.2013.nodeknockout.com/ I bet RossPenman, LennyKhazan and the others in the team would love your votes.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

rohamg 13y ago

Very interesting, I'm looking forward to checking out the product! We use GitHub exclusively for everything; even our non-technical team-members leverage GitHub for sales, HR, marketing, blog post writing.. You name it. We did have to build a product to make this easier on ourselves [1], into which we've been resisting integrating chat. Chat is the only non-GitHub piece of our workflow, Gitter looks promising! [1] http://zenhub.io http://zenhub.io

bbthorson 13y ago
We have this in production and would love your feedback http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos

bbthorson 13y ago

We've already built this at Kato http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos http://kato.quora.com/Free-Kato-For-Open-GitHub-Repos