
Github redesigns Profiles - obilgic
https://github.com/defunkt
======
damncabbage
It looks very nice, but there's a couple of things that bug me:

\- Now "owning" a repo seems even more important. Regularly commit to someone
else's repo? Not evident unless you go digging for it.

\- The timeline bar-graph used to show blue for your own commits and grey for
other people's. Now it either looks like you did all the work (your own repo),
or someone else did it (forked repos).

Even if these two don't matter to you personally, I fear it'll help drive
behaviour you see a lot in the Ruby community where, unless it's a huge
project like Rails, people start their own versions in the hope of getting it
popular and recognised. There's little status to be gotten from tinkering on
"someone else's" repo.

(Think social startups except with code libraries.)

~~~
erichocean
They've also removed the "traffic" graph, that showed you how many people have
viewed your project over the last 90 days or so (I can't remember the exact
amount). That was a very useful way to gauge interest.

Honestly, IMO, GitHub has been getting worse, not better, since the spring. I
have no idea why, but they're taking away features -- perhaps to speed up the
site?

Anyway, I don't get it. They dropped their "social coding" motto awhile back,
perhaps they're targeting other things now? Maybe they had to scale back
features to raise that $100 million? It's a mystery.

~~~
tedivm
I really, really miss the traffic graphs. Before I moved to github I had
google analytics running for each of my projects, which was absolutely amazing
for discovering when people talked about them. The increased contributions is
worth the trade off, but I do miss that info.

~~~
phpnode
a friend of mine built this which you might find useful:
<http://githalytics.com/>

~~~
tedivm
The problem with that is it only tracks a single page.

------
craigc
I am not crazy about the new design. It actually feels less designed to me.

Particularly I don't like that the activity is now hidden on profile pages. I
often like to look at people's activity, and it bothers me that it is an extra
click away every time now.

I miss the blue to distinguish your own commits from commits by other users.

Information that used to be available right on top such as organizations, and
people the user is following are now harder to find or below the fold (on my
macbook air 11").

Also now that the filters on top have more emphasis (All, Public, Private,
etc) I think they should remove ones that are not useful. For example I don't
have any private repos or mirrors so I feel like there shouldn't be links to
empty pages, but this is a minor detail.

On top of that I think the page itself has a bit too much white space. It
feels a bit plain to me.

~~~
cobychapple

      It actually feels less designed to me.
    

Some would say that less design is a good thing, for the same reasons less
code is a good thing.

~~~
lifeisstillgood
Only if that less code and less design expresses more

I agree the loss of who works on what is poor - but it's always been hard to
tell mine vs yours - I am a bit annoyed but on mature reflection I want to
give them the benefit of the doubt and see them iterate out

------
yuvadam
More change for the sake of change from Github.

Both the profile and the dashboard now show _less_ information than they used
to. The icons are a nice touch but totally irrelevant, and are not effective
on a quick glance.

Meanwhile, the streams constantly show redundant information: e.g. 10
successive commits+push or wiki edits on the same project (happens all the
time in my feeds) consume 10 distinct rows - why not collapse them together?

The launch bar was actually a cool idea, but it's more of a hack than a useful
tool. And pray tell me what good does the /launch page do? Why should I ever
use it as a landing page?

And don't get me started on the push performance, which is abysmal and feels
like it has constantly been degrading over time.

I'll say it again, I <3 github, and they're a truly awesome team. But for the
past several months every single change they've made was a big "wow, new X,
let's take a look" followed by a sad, soft "meh".

~~~
zachinglis
Less information? I can now understand people's projects far quicker, and read
information about them far quicker.

As both a designer, and a programer, neither side of me has complaints. It's
much cleaner and very much a step in the right direction.

Just because you're not fumbling to say what a beautiful new change it is, I
am betting without realising it will make your life easier.

People don't like change.

~~~
rudasn
There is definitely less information visible on the Dashboard page than
before. The idea of collapsing similar items together would actually add some
value, instead of just adding more whitespace and changing the icons.

> People don't like change.

Never say never, Less is more, blah blah blah.

------
llimllib
It's weird that it doesn't distinguish between your commits and others'.

I have one forked repo that I forked to fix a line in their docs, and it looks
to all the world like I spent a time of time on it.

~~~
apgwoz
Did you mean repositories? There's a slightly different icon for forked repos,
but it's not very obvious.

~~~
damncabbage
The commit activity graphs used to differentiate between your activity (blue)
and other people's activity (grey).

Now it's just all grey. :(

------
machrider
I still can't write a blurb about myself. I'd really like to see that, since
(for a lot of people) Github is starting to be the geek resume.

~~~
scribu
It's pretty easy to tell if you're a "python hacker" or a "C hacker" etc. with
a quick glance over your repos and their descriptions.

~~~
pdwetz
But not everything can be in open view of the public; it'd be nice to mention
closed source projects you've worked on as well.

------
revisionzero
Im not really sure whats going on here. Github without a doubt is great,
however, I'm not really sure how people like these changes. The UI and general
flow is going from a concise, fairly simple site (design-wise) to a bloated
feeling over-designed (useless icons, far to much white space, and removal of
info) website.

This is concerning because its a sign of to much focus, going from x1 amount
of resources to x10 means you risk over-developing what was great. You have
too much time, to many resources, so you over develop things when they truly
don't need any changes (at the time). The only saving grace here is they could
be in the middle of a shift to a much larger vision, so these changes all seem
poor until it all comes together in the following months. I have to ask
though, why the shotgun approach to the updates then, they should take their
time, once a week would be enough change for me, allow me to actually feel out
the changes before adding more. =/

------
tjholowaychuk
I get the whole big icon small icon thing for the feeds, and it looks great
when they're in sequence with others of the same size, but when it's mixed it
looks really bad IMHO. I'm no design pro so I dont know what a good solution
would be but it throws things off

------
Harkins
...how about some privacy controls? I'd really prefer not to advertise which
users and projects I'm following or starring. Now I have Facebook trying to
own and broadcast my personal life and GitHub trying to own and broadcast my
professional one. Ugh.

~~~
solox3
Can you give an example where you would star something you find embarrassing?

~~~
Harkins
I don't need to. What I choose to pay attention to should be private by
default.

And it's not about personal embarrassment, it's also about security. If I star
code I rely on to watch for updates, I'd be publicly advertising the attack
surface for my app. That really sucks.

~~~
graywh
How are you getting updates for projects you've starred?

------
bretthopper
Check your dashboard/News Feed. Also featuring a new design right now.

~~~
erichocean
And it's awful. I used to be able to see the description about a repository
someone I follow had starred, and it was easily my best way to find out about
interesting projects.

Now, all you see is username/repositoryname, which is damn near useless. They
replaced actual _content_ with...whitespace.

I don't know how they screwed this one up so badly, but they need to change it
back to being socially useful again, and pronto.

~~~
stagas
+1, starred without the description is pretty much useless. All I read is
"Random Person starred OtherRandom/random-repo". Need to save room? Group
similars together. "X, Y, Z and 15 others starred X/Y, The coolest util in the
world".

------
bdesimone
There's a facebook in my github.

------
DigitalSea
Github are absolutely killing it right now. Seems like everyday there's a new
HN submission about a cool new Github feature or redesigned aspect. The new
profile design is nice, but seems more emphasis has been placed on users who
own repos as opposed to contributing to other repos.

Still needs a space to add in a brief bio though considering Github is
considered to be the new age developer resume.

~~~
erichocean
The frontpage posts recently have been about site-wide GitHub outages (twice),
plus their blog post about how it happened.

Not exactly "killing it", unless I misunderstood you...

~~~
DigitalSea
Slow down there for a minute, man. It was in reference to the new command bar
feature they recently implemented, being able to search & filter stars, the
addition of the commit status API and all of that was introduced this month.
September has been a very busy month for Github in terms of changes and
functionality, so yes I'd say killing it.

As for the outages, at least they were honest and transparent about the
outages unlike many other companies who try and sweep it under the rug.
Accountability and transparency are 2 great traits to have in a company.

No need to be so cynical erichocean.

------
obilgic
Since they have not posted anything about it yet, this might again be an
accidental release of the branch.

I wonder how many of these accidental deploys they have on a regular basis
which we don't notice.

~~~
kneath
Or perhaps we've spent the past few weeks furiously improving performance so
we can ship this genpop, and we chose to ship during downtraffic times to give
extra insurance the feature would improve speed rather than degrade it.

No deploy is on accident.

~~~
obilgic
Are you saying the last one was not an accident either?

Only reason I thought this was an accident is because there was no blog post
about it. Usually Github introduces it's every single improvement[1] on it's
blog. Compared to them this definitely deserves an introduction.

[1] <https://github.com/blog/1184-contributing-guidelines>

~~~
Shank
I asked Zach Holman: It wasn't an accident, and a blog post will be up later.

<https://twitter.com/holman/status/248675337536413696>

------
agilebyte
Not happy with the change. More whitespace, but harder to see what is going
on. I would like:

\- to see the activity of all repos at a glance, not just on hover \- visually
pick out repos that are predominantly in one language over another

------
mpd
I wish they would spend resources on being as fast as they used to be. Pushing
and pulling has become slower and slower over the past couple of years.

------
pooriaazimi
Extremely poor scroll performance, it has to re-draw everything every time I
scroll. OS X 10.8.1, Safari 6.0, 15" 2009 MacBook Pro.

The design is nice, though.

------
arturadib
Interesting cosmetic change - debatable if it's for the better (the repo
activity graphs are now barely visible, and the user activity bars have
disappeared).

I'd prefer to see work done on features that are hurting the utility of the
profile page - like listing repos that you're a collaborator of, but not
necessarily the owner.

As it stands, the profile page is a misrepresentation of a user's work on
Github.

------
caseorganic
Why do great websites always feel compelled to redesign? Digg, Stumbleupon,
Facebook etc. It is very unsettling. The equivalent of someone coming into you
home when you're not there and changing the entire floorplan, then expecting
you to be elated when you come back at night, instead of confused and
disoriented when all of the cupboards seem larger than they appear.

~~~
nsmartt
It isn't your home, it's a hotel.

------
pessimism
The profile is a real improvement (although it might be preferable to fit more
repos into a smaller space?), but the public activity stream still seems as
hopeless as before. I pointed out some reasons with pictures for the older
version, but the points still apply: <http://pygm.us/RFLFk4nt>.

------
ricardobeat
The page is really, really slow on an iPad 1. There must be something wrong
since it's so simple, probably some CSS weirdness.

------
rsobers
The one thing I wish were clearer is whether a respository is a fork or not.
I'd like to easily be able to scan the page and pick out the forks.

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hcarvalhoalves
I was surprised when I saw it too... not even a blog post about it?

It looks nice though.

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joejohnson
These changed haven't been applied to Github:Enterprise yet.

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saiko-chriskun
what's with all the negativity :P. the new design is waay better. I'm
surprised they haven't updated it 'till now.

~~~
lbotos
While I agree with you, the one thing I miss is the repo description on my
news feed. Before I could have an at a glance view of what my friends were
starring and hacking on without ever having seen it before. Now If I want to
know what visionmedia/every, mattlong/hermes, or erichocean/blossom is I need
to click through. It's not much, but it's definitely going to put an extra
step in the filtering of signal vs. noise.

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jguimont
It flickers when I scroll down on Safari. Very Annoying.

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barlog
Pretty, not nonsense :^) Will android app aplly too?

