GitHub Upgrades Client Capabilities To Streamline Developer Workflows

GitHub released two product upgrades Tuesday designed to make it easier for developers to access capabilities of the popular repository for version-controlled open source code without leaving their desktop environments.

A new version of the San Francisco-based startup's client-side software, GitHub Desktop, simplifies the user experience and makes developer workflows more efficient, said Phil Haack, director of client apps at GitHub.

Previous desktop applications had been built natively for the Macintosh and Windows operating systems. The latest release, still in beta, was rewritten using the Electron development framework and offers a single code base that will eventually supplant its predecessors, Haack said.

[Related: GitHub Adds To Online Services Capabilities In A Bid For Business Developers]

Another upgrade to Atom will allow developers to perform Git operations, like committing code and resolving merge conflicts, directly inside the text editor which enjoys more than two million monthly users.

"We find a lot of developers don’t want to switch to another tool," Haack told CRN. "They like to do things right from the comfort of their desktop development environment."

The Atom upgrade is similar to an extension GitHub previously shipped for Visual Studio.

Haack said his group is working on extending GitHub beyond the browser and the command line.

That "makes it more approachable to developers who might use a variety of tools, or want things more powerful than the command line" when working with Git, a version control system, and the Github platform.