Designing GitHub for Mac

It blows my mind that no one tried to do anything special. Git (and it’s DVCS cousins like Mercurial & Bazaar) provide an amazing platform to build next generation clients — and it’s like the entire OS X ecosystem left their imagination at home.

Eventually, I (well, many of us) decided that better native clients (OSX, Windows, Linux, Eclipse, Visual Studio, etc) was the best way to grow GitHub. And since we all use Macs — we should start off with an OS X application.

Kyle Neath has posted an excellent overview of what designing the official GitHub Mac app was like, the challenges he and his team had to face when dealing with Apple’s recent interface changes coming in Lion, and the overall “new trend” of Mac apps inspired by their counterparts.

Check out the whole story and screenshot gallery here.