Show HN: Shrink, a free menu bar app for your GitHub issues

Show HN: Shrink, a free menu bar app for your GitHub issues(shrink.alasdairmonk.com)

40 points by sgottit 11 years ago | 16 comments

aleem 11 years ago |

Beware, granting access to this app (or others like it) will mean it will have access to everything including your private repos' source code. This is pretty bad. If you are going to use this to access your company/startup repo, you should probably get approval from your lead or manager before installing it.

Unfortunately, Github, for all it's security efforts, still does not offer token permissions to be limited to "Issues" only. It's all or nothing when it comes to repos. Github's own native client/app doesn't have issue tracking either. This means there are lots of people installing these kind of apps for issue tracking and inevitably the security is as good as the weakest link in this chain. I wish someone at Github could remedy this.

IssuePost http://issuepostapp.com/ is a similar app. However, the developer has revoked the app for similar reasons.

> Issuepost is unavailable at the moment. Unfortunately, GitHub's OAuth API authorizes access to the entirety of users' private repos, and does not allow you to only request access to read/write issues. As a result, I have decided to pull the app from the App Store until I can find a better way to make the app more secure.

mik3y 11 years ago | |

I tried hailing a random security Githubber or two on Twitter about the lack of an issues-only oauth scope; no response.

I can only conclude they're holding it back deliberately, since it seems both a glaring omission and simple fix. GitHub, prove me wrong..

z1mm32m4n 11 years ago | |

Ahh, that's disappointing. I guess for now I'll just stick with https://github.com/stephencelis/ghi.

One thing that I discovered after seeing that Shrink lists "Subscribed" issues is that ghi has an option '-f' which lets you filter by 'all', 'assigned', 'created', 'mentioned', or 'subscribed', which is all I need for my purposes.

thisishugo 11 years ago | |

Well, you can at least limit it to only seeing your public repos and not the private ones[0]. Of course, that doesn't negate the fact that should the developer have coded the app to modify your code, you can't do anything to stop them.

[0] http://c.thisishugo.com/1bPz7+

bobwaycott 11 years ago |

There appears to be no way to quit the app & get it out of your menubar without resorting to `kill`. That's annoying and lazy.

gee_totes 11 years ago | |

I don't know if it's lazy, but it's certainly annoying.

verelo 11 years ago |

What are your experiences using Github issues?

I can only imagine so given that tools like this exist, and that Github continue to maintain Issues that people like it, but I personally don't love them. I honestly cannot put my finger on what I don't like but i've never been able to stick to it. In /real life/ I am using Jira or Redmine on a regular basis, maybe I'm just broken from their heavy and complex UI's.

ahmetmsft 11 years ago |

That's exactly what I need. I would probably pay for something crafted well that does this.

PeterBarrett 11 years ago |

This is great, allow users to create issues for a repo too and I'd use this everyday!

kolev 11 years ago |

How does it compare to Trailer [0]?

[0] https://github.com/ptsochantaris/trailer

joshcrowder 11 years ago |

Really nice work -- Is this opensource? I want to build a similar menubar application and would love to know how!

tjsix 11 years ago | |

It doesn't appear to be open source since it's not on the authors Github. However if you're looking for a menubar app example with custom views, here is one: https://github.com/phranck/CCNStatusItem. The example in that repo is what was used for this app (presumably, since the binary in the package shows as CCNStatusItem)

wingerlang 11 years ago | |

I saw you got two responses, one with a custom view and one with the standard OSX implementation. So I'll throw in another one of the old standard one, that I made: https://github.com/jontelang/WakaLet

aleffert 11 years ago | |

I wrote a Github menu bar app for pull requests. Code is here: https://github.com/aleffert/PullRequestMenu

scottostler 11 years ago |

This looks really useful. Thanks for sharing

There was a missed opportunity to name the app 'Shirk', though

matrixagent 11 years ago |

Anyone know of something (remotely) like this for (self-hosted) GitLab?