Gitspective - Facebook style timeline for your GitHub feed

Gitspective - Facebook style timeline for your GitHub feed(thechangelog.com)

55 points by netherland 14 years ago | 12 comments

empire29 14 years ago |

Fun project, but am I the only one that finds the zig-zag flow of the "Fb-timeline" difficult to follow -- or atleast more difficult than a linear feed?

What are the advantages of this style of timeline - other than less scrolling?

ntkachov 14 years ago | |

The zig-zag flow is one of the most obnoxious things i've ever seen in a website. It is one of the worst ways of displaying information ever.

Lets take this to the extream. Lets say you had a serverlog with 1 million entries and you had to parse it by hand for what ever reason. would you rather see

[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

or this

[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

                                          [Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

                                         [Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

[Jun 10, 12:32] /index.html 200 54ms nick

Just because I'm browsing my friends activity doesn't mean that I want to waste time trying to follow their god awful timeline with the jumps and the zig zags and the figureing out what came before what.

ryankirkman 14 years ago | | |

The Facebook timeline acknowledges that many modern displays have more horizontal real estate than vertical real estate. The design reflects this. It uses much larger visual elements (boxes) than a line of text which means it maximizes its use of both vertical real estate and horizontal real estate.

The other thing you're not considering is that Facebook displays more than just text. If you're displaying images inline as well as text, it's going to be more compact if you interpolate each post in a zig-zag fashion rather than making posts vertically serial.

The example you provided doesn't really illustrate why timeline is bad for a website because it's an example provided in a completely different context.

tl;dr Website design is not command line interface design.

zmoazeni 14 years ago | |

I do think there may be some honest criticisms for it. But regarding gitspective, my design is bad. Very bad. So bad, I considered making everything shades of hot pink so it might motivate a designer (who would normally pass) to help me out.

I would expect with a better design the back-and-forth would flow would look a lot easier on the eyes.

ori_b 14 years ago | | |

Facebook's timeline is bad enough that if I see it, I just close the page. I have enough trouble reading it and figuring out what's going on that I just don't do it.

trustfundbaby 14 years ago | | |

Why are you married to the back-and-forth thing anyway?

Is it just because facebook does it, or do you have some other strong reason for using it.

trustfundbaby 14 years ago | |

Totally agree, I was going to say the same thing, but I didn't want to come across as a curmudgeon. The idea of Timeline is brilliant, but the zigzag implementation is such a violation of the user experience (in my opinion) that I have no idea how it made it into production.

zmoazeni 14 years ago |

Original Dev here. This is still rough around the edges. There are views that aren't implemented for certain events and masonry behaving oddly sometimes when filtering.

I hope you all like it thought!

lucisferre 14 years ago |

It's cool but really the one thing I want to be able to see and illustrate is code contributions to OSS projects. Pull request history and when they got pulled (if it could filter only those that got pulled that would be great).

I'd like to look back over a year and seeing how much OSS work I got done.

zmoazeni 14 years ago | |

Totally agree. The PullRequest events have stale data regarding the status of the pull request. I think it's capturing the status at the time the event occurs.

I was considering firing off requests to find out the latest status of PullRequests and indicating that in the design. e.g. When pull requests were merged in and closed.

beberlei 14 years ago |

Very cool.

But this would be even cooler if it would be a timeline of all the projects, organizations I am part of. Sort of the Github Dashboard as a timeline, but with additional logic to group certain events (commits for example) per project to reduce the clutter and with all the organizations in one dashboard (currently you have to use the dropdown to switch between them).