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Ask HN: Review my Startup - GitMac: Git, made easy (gitmacapp.com)

18 points by SpiralLab ↗ HN
As a long time reader(lurker) of HN, I am excited to finally have something to share with everyone.

After migrating from Subversion (and the excellent Versions SVN client) - to Git, there wasn't an OSX app that made it easy to work with checkouts without using the command line (as much). So we decided to make one.

http://gitmacapp.com/

The product is basically at alpha/pre-beta stage, so any feedback would be very much appreciated. Thanks so much.

16 comments

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SpiralLab
As a longtime HN reader(cough, lurker) I am excited to finally have something to share with everyone.

The reasoning behind GitMac was after migrating from Subversion (and the excellent Versions client) - to Git, there wasn't an OSX app that made it easy to work with checkouts without using the command line (as much). So we decided to make one.

The product is basically in Alpha/pre-Beta stage, so any feedback is very much appreciated. Thanks so much.

johncoltrane
G5 owner, here. Is Gitmac UB or Intel only?

And yes, I should have replied to the OP.

younata
My suggestions:

figure out a way to integrate it with xcode. The lack of git support is the main reason I still use vim for all of my non-cocoa development.

If this is already done, then congrats, I'm one of your early adopters.

Edit: realized I can't actually try it NOW.

SpiralLab
Yeah, we are in "pre" Beta state, just taking registrations right now.

As far as Xcode integrations go, I think Xcode 4 actually has Git integrated baked in.

SpiralLab
Forgot to add, of course, you can open any file/doc in XCode/Textmate/app-of-choice directly from gitmac.
teilo
I am very curious to see if something like this gains traction, mostly because I wonder how many developers work like I do.

While I appreciate having repository support in an IDE (Eclipse and TextMate), I still find myself using the command-line most of the time (for Mercurial in my case). It would never occur to me to look for a Mercurial UI. It's just so easy to do this stuff from the command line.

SpiralLab
Yeah it is definitely a niche product. It's mostly targeted at developers who want a simple one-click way to do the most common actions with local checkouts - add, rm, commit, etc. Or people migrating from a "traditional" VCS, that aren't quite familiar with git commands yet.

"Advanced" functionality - merging, rebase, etc - was purposely left out because that most likely to be done at the command line no matter what.

briandoll
This looks awesome! While I will always prefer a command-line interface over a GUI for tools like this, it's SO important to have really elegant GUI tools for everybody else.

Git is great. The git command-line tools allow you do do all sorts of SCM gymanstics, but are hard to use if you're a designer just trying to commit the latest CSS file and push it out to your integration server.

It would be really awesome if it were possible to have the app call out to shell scripts to perform certain gestures. Many development teams have custom scripts for their workflow, and it would be great if this GUI could easily let folks use that workflow without touching the command-line.

SpiralLab
Thank for the feedback. That is exactly the void we are trying to fill! Git is awesome, but the functionality can be overwhelming for people at times.

As for the scripting, are you talking about integrating with git hooks, or just plain scripts? I would love to hear more about your idea, email me at theSpiralLab@gmail.com

edparcell
Looks interesting. I develop on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms. My desktop is Windows+Mac, and I'm currently using TortoiseGit on Windows and GitX on Mac, plus the command-line where necessary or more convenient. I haven't done too much Mac development in the last few months, so this is from memory - the situation may have changed since.

I would guess GitX is your main competition. GitX is perfectly friendly, and quite useful for staging and making commits on a single development branch, but doesn't exactly have great coverage of the other features of git that I use, so I end up resorting to command-line relatively often. Good for me I'm sure, but it hampers my workflow a little, especially if I have to start diving through docs when I know what I want to do, but need to look up the arguments to do it.

With that said, I'd welcome a more complete Mac Git GUI, and I look forward to tracking your progress, and evaluating your product when possible. Best of luck.

SpiralLab
Yep, you are spot on. GitX is the best OSX app for Git right now. Though last time I checked the barrier of entry was a little high because there were lots of forks with different features.

For the initial release, we are purposefully not including some of the more "advanced" features, until we get feedback on what's most valuable to our users.

Which tasks are most likely to drive you to the command line?

chrismiller
This is exactly the kind of program I was looking for a few months ago when I first started doing all of my development on my Mac.

Looking forward to testing this out. Any idea of when you will be ready to release the beta?

SpiralLab
We are shooting for a October/November Beta Release.