[HN Gopher] The Past, Present, and Future of UI at GitHub
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       The Past, Present, and Future of UI at GitHub
        
       Author : mooreds
       Score  : 21 points
       Date   : 2025-01-24 21:38 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (hawksley.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (hawksley.org)
        
       | nsm wrote:
       | I am curious to understand what bearing "lots and lots of regular
       | people solely use their cellphone to conduct consumer
       | transactions" has on GitHub, whose audience is significantly
       | different than median and cannot otherwise function without a
       | laptop/desktop.
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | I frequently use GitHub on my phone, making edits to my
         | projects using their web edit button. And I have a very decent
         | laptop.
         | 
         | I wish Codespaces worked better on mobile! It would be great to
         | see them invest more work in that.
         | 
         | Anecdotally I've heard that there are people out there who have
         | successfully learned to program entirely on mobile devices.
        
         | a1o wrote:
         | I don't know but I really wish it was possible to have the web
         | desktop in mobile, GitHub has a terrible app that can't do
         | anything and even worse mobile view. In the past it was
         | possible to tell it to run the desktop version of the website
         | with the browser setting but this isn't possible anymore. I
         | have a very big phone, it's screen has a ton of pixels, just
         | give me a grown up UI exactly like the desktop instead of the
         | dumbed down, way too zoomed in whatever thing you are offering
         | on mobile.
        
       | simonw wrote:
       | > According to Pew Research
       | https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/fact-sheet/mobile/ 15
       | percent of U.S. adults only access the internet through a mobile
       | device.
       | 
       | That number seemed surprising to me - I actually expected the
       | portion of mobile-only internet users would be significantly
       | higher than that.
       | 
       | Turns out the 15% number means something slightly different. From
       | that Pew Research page:
       | 
       | "Today, 15% of U.S. adults are "smartphone-only" internet users -
       | meaning they own a smartphone but say they do not subscribe to a
       | home broadband service."
       | 
       | So the 15% is people who use the internet exclusively via LTE/5G
       | without paying for home broadband.
       | 
       | (I'm surprised that number isn't higher as well.)
        
       | xnx wrote:
       | Will GitHub ever change the file list preceding the README.md
       | content? This has always seemed a poor default, but maybe the way
       | I use GitHub is different than their primary user?
        
         | acedTrex wrote:
         | I don't know why anyone would want this. I use github to look
         | at code, the code should be front and center immediately.
        
         | mfro wrote:
         | I think this is a problem solved by github pages. If a
         | project's primary distribution method is github, they should
         | build a Page and link people to that, instead of the repo.
        
       | xnx wrote:
       | Glad to see some discouragement of custom design systems. I
       | shudder at the person-hours that have been squandered on that
       | fruitless endeavor. Pre-web, essentially zero time was spent on
       | "design systems", and we were all better for it.
        
       | cyberax wrote:
       | > Which is all to say, that mobile is the new baseline. And we're
       | trying to match it using a technology stack originally built for
       | displaying documents!
       | 
       | This is such a bullshit take. I don't think I ever used my phone
       | to do anything on Github. Nor do I want to.
        
         | throwaway-1231 wrote:
         | Ironically, the blog doesn't work well on mobile. The width is
         | fixed, the end of the sentences are out of view. I have to
         | vertically scroll right/left to read
        
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       (page generated 2025-01-24 23:00 UTC)