
Show HN: Gitter – Chat for GitHub - mydigitalself
http://gitter.im
======
fhd2
(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.

~~~
suprememoocow
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
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.

------
markrickert
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
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
Isnt echoing errors like that a security issue? Im not implying it necessarly
is, because it's obviously conveniently useful for debugging.

~~~
elisee
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.

------
bazzargh
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
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.

------
conorgil145
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
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.

------
janerik
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
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
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
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
(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
"I don't have a disposable Github/Facebook/Twitter/etc account."

Now _there 's_ a business idea: Mailinator for shady sites harvesting "social"
accounts.

------
nnd
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
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
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
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!

~~~
calv
I was looking at the source and found your rick astley. It looked really weird
in chrome's dev tools :P. Your CSS/HTML is way better than mine, time to
polish my skills..

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

------
vlad
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
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 :(

~~~
lennykhazan
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)

------
rohamg
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
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)

------
aram
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!

~~~
bbthorson
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

------
mydigitalself
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
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
Thanks for the support. We'll be absolutely sure to have a useful free tier as
well as a paid offering.

~~~
odonnellryan
Thanks! That's what I meant to imply, but I didn't know how to phrase it.

------
stigi
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
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
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
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
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
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

------
tomtheengineer
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.

------
dreamdu5t
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?

------
mfenniak
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).

------
dcaunt
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
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
Absolutely, and I wish you all the best. Look forward to using it!

------
naiquevin
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
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
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...

------
nakovet
From the screenshot with localhost on location bar I thought it would be self
hosted.

EDIT: The screenshot was updated. ;D

~~~
mydigitalself
Ah no, that was just shotted off my local development environment.

------
davman
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
That's a great idea, wish we'd thought of it. We'll share the learnings
afterwards on @GitChat.

------
podviaznikov
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
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
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
Would love to chat to you directly about all this. Your contact details are
hard to find!

~~~
mydigitalself
Is that Matt of Haraka fame?

~~~
baudehlo
Yes, it's on my profile page here

------
cookrn
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)

------
j-hernandez
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.

------
buf
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.

~~~
trevorah
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
HipChat also has a free tier (for teams of 5 or smaller).
[https://www.hipchat.com/pricing](https://www.hipchat.com/pricing)

~~~
trevorah
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.

------
bbthorson
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)

------
JamesAdir
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
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.

------
sberder
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
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.

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

~~~
mydigitalself
Oh, we'll have awesome emotigifs(tm?) and will certainly look at baking Hubot
right in.

Thanks for your feebdack.

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

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

------
chacha102
The 'support' button for trou.pe doesn't work. :(

~~~
mydigitalself
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/)

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

------
Artemis2
"Available everywhere that has internets"

And my Windows Phone? :(

~~~
mydigitalself
Ah, yes on that too! Sorry, didn't mean to leave you guys out.

------
nichol4s
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
@gitchat on twitter for now.

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

~~~
mydigitalself
+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
job conditioning, I always look at the source code and the GTmetrix (YSlow,
Page Speed) of all the "show HN" projects I see

------
lewq
I initially read this as "GitHub for cats"

------
daGrevis
Is it open-sourced?

~~~
mydigitalself
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.

------
mrcactu5
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

------
atmosx
Great great app :-) Impressive!

------
coherentpony
Will it be open source?

