GitHub Launches an App and Tons of New Features

Every year, at GitHub’s universe conference the contributions of more than 40 million developers are celebrated. This time, the platform has announced several new products and has made several beta features generally available.

One of the most interesting announcements is the GitHub Mobile that will allow users to review codes and make limited changes in it using their smartphones. Apart from that, GitHub Actions and Packages are now out of beta, they have redesigned the notifications experience, introduced GitHub Security Lab, and have created a program to preserve the world’s code for the next 1,000 years.

GitHub Actions (out of beta)

At yesteryear’s GitHub universe, the GitHub actions were launched in beta. This is a community-led approach to software automation. Developers have been testing the feature in beta for a year now. According to GitHub, their feedback has:

helped shape Actions into the new standard for communities to build and share automation for software development, including a full CI/CD solution and native package management.

Thus, at the event, they announced the general availability of this community-led service that has been created using contributions from platforms like AWS, Google, HashiCorp, Twilio, and many others.

GitHub has also made use of self-hosted runners, artifact caching, and the ability to run Actions on ARM-based architectures (like Raspberry Pi) freely available.

GitHub Packages (out of beta)

GitHub Package, previously known as the GitHub package registry, was announced in May last year. It is a way to combine packages and source codes in one place where the developers can also manage integrated permissions and billings. The service includes downloads of statistics and details, along with the entire history of packages.

According to GitHub:

Since introducing the GitHub Packages beta, over 30,000 unique packages have been uploaded, serving the needs of over 10,000 organizations. We listened to your feedback during the beta and added proxy support for the primary NPM registry, support for using the GitHub Actions token, and many other improvements.

Both GitHub packages and Actions have been made a part of every developer’s account. They also include minutes, storage, and data transfer, free for all public repositories. Actions can be used to automatically publish new packaged to the GitHub Packages.

GitHub for Mobile (beta)

The service is currently available in beta for iOS but the platform has promised to roll out on Android soon.

GitHub for mobile is something developers have been longing for. It will give developers a lot of flexibility to move work forward and stay in touch with the team no matter where they are. Even though the mobile application will not provide developers with a complex development environment it will allow users to perform simple and non-complex tasks like sharing feedback on a design discussion and reviewing a few lines of code. Moreover, the application automatically adapts to every screen size even in dark mode.

GitHub, in their blog post, said:

Now we are making these tasks easy for you to perform, no matter where you work, with a beautiful native experience.

Notifications (beta)

Even if you are on a medium-sized team on GitHub, notifications from your projects can get overwhelming. Most GitHub users have complained about overcrowded inboxes making it hard to separate important notifications from noise.

Since last year GitHub has rolled out release-only notifications, mark as read, gist notifications, and other ways to improve how you collaborate with teams. Now, however, rather than pushing the notification emails to the user’s inbox, the platform has added an inbox experience into GitHub. This will enable users to filter through the notifications and work on the most important ones.

GitHub wrote in a blog post:

You can spend less time sorting through the noise and focus on getting the right work done. Step away from your screen, view streamlined notifications on mobile, and come back to an experience that’s customized for the way you work.

You can also set up custom filters to find the most important ones.

Code Navigation and Code Search (beta)

To improve the overall user experience, GitHub has introduced more ways to navigate through the code. It consists of two main features:

• Jump to definition
• Find all references

The code navigation feature was released in limited public beta for selected repositories early this year. At the Universe conference, it was announced that the feature is being made available for Ruby, Python, and Go repositories on GitHub.

As far as code search is concerned, GitHub writes:

Traditional approaches to search do not meet the needs of code due to case sensitivity, special characters, tokenization, and other factors specific to code. Over the next several months, we’re introducing a new search experience that provides the exact results you expect when you search code in your repository. We’ll match special characters and casing, too.

You can sign up for GitHub Beta here is you wish to access exact-match search functionality for select open-source repositories with their beta.