| CARVIEW |
Erik Michaels-Ober started a Kickstarter project to fund Hubcap, a proposed native Mac client for GitHub. The plan is to bring the elegance of various Twitter clients to GitHub and increase social engagement.
If this is something you'd be interested in, consider making a pledge to the cause. The project currently has $1,869, and needs up to $2,222 total in the next 7 days.
Welcome to the holiday edition of GitHub meetups! Its exactly like all of the other meetups, but its in December. Think of it as a congratulations, you made it to December! meetup. Hey, I like the sound of that. I know I'm proud. Give yourself a little pat on the back and let us buy you a drink. Its been quite a year.
The Facts:
15 Romolo, Wednesday (TOMORROW!) December 8th, 8:30pm
Those of you running recent versions of Safari, Chrome, or Firefox 4 may have noticed some changes to tree browsing on GitHub.
For everyone else, here's a video of our new Tree Slider:
The new HTML5 History API (which really has nothing to do with HTML — it's a JavaScript API) allows us to manage the URL changes while CSS3 transitions handle the sliding. Permalinks are always maintained, your back button works as expected, and it's much faster than waiting for a full page load.
Basically we intercept your click, call pushState() to change the browser's URL, load in data with Ajax, then slide over to it.
When you hit the back button, an onpopstate handler is fired after the URL changes, making it easy to send you "back".
Want more? Check out the HTML History API Demo and MDC's Manipulating the browser history documentation. Facebook has blogged about their use of this stuff, and Flickr has been doing it for months on their lightbox view.
There's also some hot replaceState() action over on our new Features page and the Pull Requests dashboard.
We're still getting all the kinks out of the Tree Slider, but we hope you like it!
I pushed the new Organization API documentation today. You can now access and modify Organization and Team information for your repositories.
The Org API managed to test the limits of the current GitHub API. Traditionally, the Repository API actions required only the name to update your repo information. This worked well since most of the repos that you modified were owned by your own user. With Organizations, this is no longer the case, so we deprecated several of the old Repository API actions. You are encouraged (but not required) to pass the user login and the repo name for these actions (check the docs for more details):
repos/delete/:repo
repos/set/private/:repo
repos/set/public/:repo
repos/keys/:repo
repos/key/:repo/add
repos/key/:repo/remove
repos/collaborators/:repo/add/:collaborator
repos/collaborators/:repo/remove/:collaborator
Thank you to all the developers that helped us out during the beta. We received some valuable feedback that helped us fine tune the APIs and ensure its consistency. If you are a developer that works with the API a lot, be sure to follow the API Support Forum for announcements on new API updates.
It seems like way too often I run into someone who's been using GitHub for a long time but has just learned about one of our long-time features like Fork Queue or blame visualization.
So today we're launching the start of our Features section. It's just a lightweight tour of all the features GitHub has.
Browse around, even if you're a long time GitHub user — I'm betting you'll find something that you didn't know GitHub could do. Head on over to https://github.com/features to get started.
I'm going to be in the DC area this weekend for Git training in Reston, VA through our friends at Jumpstart Lab, so I thought it would be a good time to do a little drinkup. Last time we had a blast, so I hope to see some of you again.
This Monday, Dec 6th at 7pm I'll open a tab at the Four Courts in Arlington, VA, right next to the Court House metro stop on the Orange Line, so be sure to drop by for a pint or two.
Monday, Dec 6th, 7:00pm
Ireland Four Courts
Arlington, VA
Do you write code in your free time, for fun? Ever thought about doing it to save lives?
Random Hacks of Kindness is a global hackathon on December 4 and 5 (this weekend!) to create apps for the millions of people who suffer the effects of disasters.
The first RHoK event resulted in applications that were later used during the devastating earthquakes in Haiti and Chile. The second event - held simultaneously in six countries around the world - produced a tool that is currently being piloted in the Caribbean by the World Bank.
Right now they're looking for coders and tech students to participate at RHoK events at multiple locations around the world. U.S. locations include Atlanta, Chicago, New York, and Seattle. International locations are Toronto and Vancouver, Canada; Aarhus, Denmark; Berlin, Germany; Bangalore, India; Jakarta, Indonesia; Nairobi, Kenya; Lusaka, Zambia; Bogota, Colombia; and São Paulo, Brazil.
Register today: https://www.rhok.org/events/rhok-2/
Black Friday. Cyber Monday. But have you heard of Octocat Wednesday? Probably not because I just made that up. Lucky for you we're also making up the prices around here for the next week.
Which brings me to the subject of this blog post — free private repositories. For the next week, we're offering one month of our Micro plan (that's 5 private repositories and 1 private collaborator) to anyone who isn't already enjoying the sweet nectar of personal private repositories.
So what's the deal? Just log into your dashboard. If you are eligible, you'll see a notice with a link to redeem your free month.
Don't have an account yet? Sign up for a free account then you'll be eligible to redeem this coupon.
If you've ever been curious what GitHub's private repository hosting feels like, now's the time to try it out. But hurry up — this offer will expire in a week.
Looking for awesome developers? Good news! GitHub Jobs and The Changelog have teamed up to showcase your job listings on The Changelog's popular podcast.
Just check "Advertise this listing on The Changelog Podcast for an additional $100" when creating your next job listing and we'll take care of the rest.
We've been fans of The Changelog since it launched. With consistently good blog posts and a fantastic podcast, we're proud to feature their content on Explore GitHub and super excited about teaming up with them to showcase GitHub Jobs.
One of the long running issues with Git is that the library produced to run the binary is not re-entrant - you can't link to it from another program because it calls die() all over the place. Thus, anyone trying to write a GUI or web interface or script for Git has always had to fork/exec a call to the actual Git binary, which is slow and often a poor API (having to parse the text output).
A few years ago Shawn Pearce started a new Git library designed and licensed to be linkable and called it libgit2. This was a great idea, but nobody really ran with it and not much was done on it for several years. Fortunately this year a student choose it for their Google Summer of Code project and for better or worse got me as their mentor.
Well, that student did an amazing job taking the library from being basically unusable to being incredibly useful. His name is Vicent Marti and GitHub has taken over where the GSoC organization left off and has contracted Vicent to continue his great work on libgit2 and its Ruby bindings, the Rugged library.
The projects are still in a bit of flux, but there is quite a lot you can do now and there are bindings for Python in addition to Ruby. If you are interested in using it for something and have any features you would like to see, add an issue to our GitHub project. You can read more about libgit2 at its new website: libgit2.github.com.
A little about Vicent: Vicent Marti is a 20 year old developer born and raised in the Catalan Countries. He is currently working towards his Masters Degree in Computer Science while living in Helsinki (Finland) and trying to cope with the fact that water comes in shapes and forms other than "liquid; in the Mediterranean". When he's not working on anything related to indie videogames, he enjoys evangelizing about Git and being an asshole about it.
It's Cyber Monday and we've decided to do something special. For today only you can get 25% off any orders you make at The GitHub Shop! Sale ends Tuesday morning at midnight (PST).
Coupon Code: CYBERCAT
Not only do you get a HUGE discount, but GitHub Mugs are back in stock!
But wait, there's more! Today we're introducing a brand new shirt. We call it the Blacktocat, and it's the softest shirt you'll ever find. Featuring a super stealth black on black design, this American Apparel Tri-blend t-shirt will keep you cozy AND impress your friends. Makes the perfect holiday gift!
Remember, we ship international. What are you waiting for, go check out all the great GitHub merchandise in The GitHub Shop now!
This December 14th we'll be kicking off the first in a series of all-day online Git training sessions. The series will be taught by our partner Matthew McCullough of Ambient Ideas, who has been doing excellent Git training and talking all over the world lately.
If you're interested in you or your colleagues getting a one-day crash course in Git, check out our new training page and sign up for the first course. Pants are of course, optional. As they are in our in-person trainings.
https://github.com/training/online
Hope to see you there!
libFreenect is an open source library for tinkering with your Kinect. People have already been using it for lightsabers, interactive puppets, multitouch interfaces, and more. It's only been a few weeks, and we've already seen some exciting prototypes. The active GitHub project itself already has 264 watchers and 49 forks.
I merged eight pull requests yesterday on our community-supported Service Hooks:
Thanks for the great updates, and for your patience :)
If you have little or no experience on the command line, and no experience with Git, this might be the ebook for you: Getting Good With Git. From command line basics to using GitHub for collaboration, there's a ton of great stuff in this thing.
With great content and a beautiful layout, you should definitely check it out if you want to learn Git.
