Gitty has been a passion of mine for the last 15 months. I created Gitty because I wanted a great GitHub experience on my iPhone and there was not one that suited my tastes. After many long nights of coding away, I launched Gitty in May of 2013 to the world. Gitty was well received and soon changed how people used GitHub on their iOS devices. I even want to think it inspired the kind folks at GitHub to begin mobile views for their site. :)
iOS 7
Later in the summer of 2013, Apple announced iOS 7 to the world and I had a big decision on my hand. I knew releasing a second version of Gitty would be premature given the launch of the first version but Gitty would need an overhaul to be up to date with this new version of iOS. I decided to update Gitty for iOS 7 and not charge my users for it. The update was well received, but deep down I knew there was a lot more I wanted to do with Gitty.
Desire
Setting out to create a GitHub experience on iOS is fairly large task if you are going to deliver on all of its features. My hope was and still is today, that anyone who purchases Gitty would feel like they are using a GitHub product. This meant that the features felt familiar, the asthetics were in line and the experience was top notch. With the first version, I felt like I did this but with Gitty 2 I wanted to really knock it out of the park.
Initial Commit
After the holidays, I began sketching out thoughts and ideas in my mind about what I would do differently. Questions arose like: Will I tweak? Will I re-write from scratch? I soon settled on the idea that I wanted to rewrite the entire Gitty app from scratch and open source it to the community.
Why open source? Well I want to help other developers learning iOS have a solid app to learn from. I also want to give back to the great community on GitHub who without their libraries and support, Gitty would be nowhere near as good as it is today. With that, Gitty 2 was “File->New” on January 29, 2014.
Next
So that is part one of the “Building Gitty 2” series. In future posts, I will open up about the tools I use to build Gitty 2, the design choices I made and how the App has performed in the App Store. I hope this information is something you find useful in your iOS Development career.
If you are interested in some open source bits that are already available from Gitty 2, check out these libraries with more to come:
- MPSHorizontalMenu - the menus used throughout the app.
- MPSFollowButton - star / follow button used on repository / user views.
- OcticonsIOS - used to bring the octicons to life.
Until next time… :)