GitHub

GitHub turns into an IDE

OK, maybe not an IDE just yet, but it’s not just a social network or a version control web interface anymore. For a while now, you could create new files, and edit existing files. Now, you can also move existing files around.

The implication of all these features together is that now you don’t really need to have a local working environment. You can work on the projects using just the GitHub’s web interface. Of course, it’s not the most convenient way in the world, and you’d be missing a lot of commonly used features, but still, if you are on the go, or if you have an urgent change to make when away from your usual working environment, GitHub has you covered. Well done, guys! Keep it up.

GitHub issue attachments

Holy Molly! Finally, one of the two things that I’ve been missing a lot from GitHub saw the light of day. From now on, GitHub issues can have attachments. So far, they are limited to only image types, but that’s enough for the majority of the situations. Because that’s what you need the most – a screenshot illustrating the problem.

Now, if only one could open up project issue tracker to general public without playing around with the API, GitHub would be complete and absolutely perfect. But something tells me that’s just a question of time. So, waiting …

GitHub source code editor

Call me stupid, but that’s one awesome feature of GitHub that I haven’t noticed until now – source code editor. When you view a file in your repository, there is an ‘Edit’ button on the toolbar above it. That provides you with a simplistic text editor (with controls for tab/space indentation and wrapping), as well as a commit log fields. Here is how it looks:

It’s not something that you would use for the majority of the coding of course, but it is a really nice option for quick edits all around. Especially, if you have non-technical people in the project who edit README and other documentation files, and have no idea about Git at all.

PHPDoc to GitHub wiki

About a month ago I came across an interesting question over at StackOverflow. Emanuele Minotto was asking if anybody knows of any easy way to integrate PHPDocumentor with GitHub’s wiki. It seemed like a really good idea, so I dug around, but didn’t find anything ready made. PHPDoc’s manual however suggests that things are possible. Unfortunately, I’m too busy currently to get involved in it myself, but I am really glad to see that Emanuele didn’t abandon the idea and started the project at GitHub. If that’s something that you are interested in, I strongly suggest lending a helping hand. I’m sure there are plenty of people who’d welcome this integration.

Is PersonalWeb Technologies a new SCO?

Linux Weekly News reports that:

Personalweb Technologies and Level 3 Communications have filed a lawsuit [PDF] against Rackspace, alleging that Rackspace’s hosting of GitHub infringes upon a long list of software patents.

One of the comments lists a few possibly related law suits:

PersonalWeb Technologies LLC et. al. v. Yahoo! Inc. filed yesterday in Texas Eastern Civil Action No. 6:12-cv-00658
PersonalWeb Technologies LLC et. al. v. Apple Inc. filed yesterday in Texas Eastern Civil Action No. 6:12-cv-00660
PersonalWeb Technologies LLC et. al. v. International Business Machines Corporation filed yesterday in Texas Eastern Civil Action No. 6:12-cv-00661
PersonalWeb Technologies LLC et. al. v. Facebook Inc. filed yesterday in Texas Eastern Civil Action No. 6:12-cv-00662
PersonalWeb Technologies LLC et. al. v. Microsoft Corporation filed yesterday in Texas Eastern Civil Action No. 6:12-cv-00663

Given the description of the company:

PersonalWeb is a proud member of the East Texas community. We are now 14 employees strong and growing. We own 15 key pending and issued patents that are critical to the development of a wide range of established and emerging distributed computing based industries and fundamental for cloud computing, distributed search engine file systems, content addressable storage and social networks.

That leaves a horribly familiar SCO aftertaste.

P.S.: More on Slashdot.