

Astral – Organize Your GitHub Stars with Ease - adamnemecek
http://astralapp.com

======
syropian
Hi all, creator of Astral here! I just pushed a fix so it doesn't require
private repo access. Sorry about that! All previous tokens have been revoked.

If you're wondering why it was there in the first place, either I'm blind and
totally missed that auth scope, or it was added sometime after I started
working on Astral, and I didn't notice it.

~~~
imkevinxu
I just spent ~15 minutes adding a bunch of tags and really hope its a good
pay-off (as in I remember to come back to this and actually use all the the
useful plugins/libraries I starred previously).

I wish tagging was easier and simpler though, like literally just typing,
pressing enter, and then tab to go to the next project. Also I turned the
auto-language tagging setting on, nothing happened so I tagged a project
"Python" then it auto-tagged 38 repos python but when I tagged more repos
nothing happened

Edit: Also I wish the tags on the left-side were able to be sorted by # or abc

~~~
younes0
I wish Astral had the same Delicious tagging feature: its suggest you most
used tags for a given link

~~~
syropian
Don't worry, more powerful tagging and organizing is coming!

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jtokoph
This could be pretty neat, but I'm hesitant to give an unknown app full write
access to my private repositories. Especially when querying public stars can
be done with readonly+public access.

I'm not sure many people would need to organize private repos that they've
starred. I for one haven't even starred any private repos.

~~~
michaelmior
+1 for this. At the very least, it would be nice to have an option to only
work with public repositories.

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davej
This is fantastic! I've always felt that when I star something it launches
into the void never to be seen again because Github makes discoverability of
starred projects so difficult.

Only thing that I feel is missing would be a browser plugin that allowed me to
add tags to a project straight from Github. It could be a bit of a slog to log
in to Astral every time I want to add a couple of tags to a project that I've
just starred.

I also notice that it uses my open-source Angular Classy project! Love seeing
examples of Classy being used in the wild :-) (pimp:
[http://davej.github.io/angular-classy/](http://davej.github.io/angular-
classy/))

~~~
syropian
Angular Classy rocks, thanks! I definitely am hoping to eventually build
browser extensions for Chrome and Safari. (I need an intern)

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akerl_
This app looks amazing, and it's pretty much what I've wished I had for a long
time... but I have no intention of trying it out while it's asking for
read/write access to all my repos.

Please make the permissions more sensible.

Also, what are your plans for offering data interaction? I would love to be
able to poll categorical data from your site so I can further extend my star
information.

~~~
adamnemecek
I stole it from this /r/webdev thread
[https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2mwlhd/astral_organ...](https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/2mwlhd/astral_organize_your_github_stars_with_ease/)
so direct your feedback that way.

~~~
res0nat0r
Unfortunately I believe the r/w access is a limitation of github right now, so
there is no way around this as of yet.

~~~
akerl_
Only if you want to be able to unstar from the app, with the app doing it via
the API. I'd much rather give it read-only public access and not be able to
unstar from it.

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syropian
Hi all, creator here (again). I've created a GitHub repo that you can file
feature requests and bug reports in. I'm struggling to keep up with HN,
Reddit, and email. [https://github.com/syropian/astral-
issues](https://github.com/syropian/astral-issues)

~~~
akerl_
What's the chance this will be open source?

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RobertKerans
This is really useful, and very nicely presented (having a secondary service
is a faff, but unless GH integrates something similar, this looks the best
solution I've seen). Just a few things I found as I tried to make a dent on my
starred repos, apologies if I've just completely missed some functionality:

\- The 'Edit Tags' form stay open when you switch repo.

\- Switching to the next repo doesn't scroll the frame back to the top, which
is a little annoying.

\- Some minimal form of initial organisation (eg just automatically adding the
language) would be good.

\- It would be helpful if the 'tags' textbox autofocussed when 'edit tags' is
clicked, so that typing could begin immediately.

\- Following on from that, binding some keyboard shortcuts, allowing something
[tab?] to save the tags and move onto the next one, would reduce the tedium of
mass adding/updating.

\- Some method of ordering the tags (ie alphabetically) would be nice, rather
than just the order they were added - I don't find search to be that useful
compared to simply scanning the list.

\- Some method of keying to the next repo would be nice

~~~
syropian
Thanks for the feedback! Keyboard accessibility and more robust
tagging/organizing is my highest priority right now, besides like, making sure
my servers don't explode. ★

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tomardern
This is brilliant. Just one thing missing...

... a chrome extension to show tags on the GitHub page.

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geoffreyy
Very nicely done, bookmarked!

My imagination would have called it Constellations to refer as stars
identified and grouped by tags :p but Astral is pretty cool and shorter =D

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dotemacs
Great, I _too_ wished I had time to create this at some point :)

Thank you for making it!

Maybe look into making the tag adding easier when you can. For example:

1\. click on the repo

2\. click on 'Edit tags'

it would be good if the focus immediately switched to the tag edit box without
having to click on it to edit it

Also, README's not in the 'default' markdown mode don't render so well. For
example if the README is in org-mode...

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seanp2k2
Wow, this is great (for non-mobile). I just did a thing a few weeks ago that
adds your GitHub started repos to Wunderlist with their description and
homepage to make searching / sorting / remembering them easier:
[https://github.com/ip2k/wunder-star](https://github.com/ip2k/wunder-star)

Really rough, but it works for me (on a crontab)

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caryhartline
Although it's made for a desktop, it actually looks fine on a small device in
landscape mode. I'm using an iPhone 5S and it's just wide enough to view the
content fine.
[https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#A3GTI3fvKXgL9](https://www.icloud.com/photostream/#A3GTI3fvKXgL9)

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edwinyzh
I have always been wondering why github hasn't provided anything like this,
given than there have been so many new awesome open source projects worth
starring keep emerging from time to time...

At the moment I also wondering, what if github integrates similar
functionalities? How services like this compete at all?

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Xorlev
It'd be a lot more valuable if it offered some initial organization (e.g. by
primary language, or by author). Otherwise I'm left with several hundred stars
to categorize.

The interface is gorgeous, but doesn't really do much. Also somewhat surprised
to see it's not on Github its self.

~~~
spullara
Also, I'm generally ok with tags that other people created for the same
repository. Not sure why I would want to do all this busy work.

------
Metapony
I am totally sold, because my github repos are numerous and I'd love to tag
them all. But the tagging feature needs a cancel button, not just save.

And drag and drop of the tags doesn't work, dragging them to the right on the
green background only scrolls it sideways.

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hlfcoding
This is pretty nice. Great job. Drag-n-drop to tag is nice.

Some feature requests:

\- Keyboard shortcuts, especially for tagging.

\- Alternate layout that supports narrow window widths, much like email
clients (Mail.app).

\- Resizable / collapsible sidebar.

\- Sortable tags list.

------
cjbprime
Nice! Does anyone know of something similar that's open source / outputs plain
HTML+JS you can put up on your website? Would be neat to share my github
starred repos without requiring someone to get an account somewhere to see
them.

~~~
mmccaff
Yes, kind of. I just recently wanted this and found
[https://github.com/skyjia/repogen](https://github.com/skyjia/repogen)

It's written in Go and outputs markdown, which you could convert to html. I
just made a repo of the output. I've starred a lot of repos and one long list
makes it easier for me to search and browse them.

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ioedward
I'm getting stuck on the sign in page. After authorizing the app with Github,
there's a black box that appears and the Sign In button shows up again.

Edit: Looks like the server is 500ing, according to the Javascript console.

------
cinamonas
Sweet! Having 500+ starred repos, I wanted to build this myself to help with
organization.

It would be nice if tag names didn't have min. length. I can't tag stuff with
"ui", "d3" etc.

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nunull
Wow! That is great. Exactly what i was missing. Design is also really nice.
Are you planning on building it as a responsive site?

Edit: Definitely found it's way to my bookmarks bar.

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raju
Really really nice! Found a place in my bookmarks folder for it.

One thing - it does not seem to allow for 2 letter tags - for e.g. I tried d3
for a couple of my repos and no cigar :(

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nodefortytwo
It would be awesome if it showed popular tags for a repo rather than having to
manually tag each one. Maybe it does have that feature and i just star obscure
repos

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madeofpalk
Edit: Disregard this, appears something funky is going on with SSL on my
work's network

Looks like it's down for now - Disappointing, looks promising.

~~~
adamnemecek
Seems up for me.

------
anonfunction
I'm pretty sure my roommate has starred the most Repos on GitHub, currently at
over 3,000. I'll have to show him this.

~~~
mh-
Astral seems to have handled my stars without any noticeable issues, so I'm
sure it'll do fine with his. ;)

[http://i.imgur.com/JjPJV6P.png](http://i.imgur.com/JjPJV6P.png)

~~~
anonfunction
I was really hoping someone would come forward. I'm at 200 and think I star
too much. Anyways I had to take a screenshot if only for the rounded numbers.

[https://i.imgur.com/hrHKmNv.png](https://i.imgur.com/hrHKmNv.png)

------
Metapony
When I try to drag off the side, it's scrolling sideways and kind of breaking
the UI. I'm using Chrome on Windows.

------
wonderfuly
nice work, few suggestions:

* I created two tags with the same name 'Python' accidentally and I can't delete neither of them

* when adding tag to a repo, it would be nice to have a "Everyone else have tagged xxxx" helper, so I can add common tags with one click

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0xAX
just wrote in twitter
([https://twitter.com/0xAX/status/533858562863165440](https://twitter.com/0xAX/status/533858562863165440))
that github must have tags for stars some days ago and i see this project.
Thank you, very useful.

------
undrcvr-lagggal
Very well designed. However what advantage does this have over browser
bookmarks/tags?

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calebm
Great job on the naming :)

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alokedesai
This is amazing! I'm surprised this didn't exist beforehand

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cemuzunlar
Is it possible to tag also "watched" repos?

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prottmann
Great job! Github should integrate this!

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rtcoms
Feature request ..

Automatically add tag , based on repo description and using natural language
processing

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sleepyhead
Thanks for choking my browser.

~~~
shiz
Using firefox? It's impossible to use, or even just scroll. Works in Chrome
though. I suppose it is the star animations at the top of the page that bring
firefox to its knees.

~~~
syropian
Ya, think I gotta kill that canvas animation on Firefox. :(

~~~
mdhgriffiths
Yes, please do. It's really bogging down Firefox. It's much better using
Chrome.

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fiatjaf
Really? This is where we are as humans?

The fact that I was interested enough to click in the link and consider
getting an account a minute ago now seems repulsive to me. What the hell am I
doing?

Anyway, this seems to be a good service. I like organizing things, I think it
is a good thing to do, but with the luck of God I did not sign up when I
clicked the link, and I hope I'll never.

~~~
ehmorris
Yes. We are truly lost as a species. Not only are we creating banal
organizational apps, but we're also taking the time to try to make the author
feel bad by decrying its lack of higher purpose in a HN comment.

