Earlier in this chapter, we cover a couple of integrations that bring GitHub information into other collaboration tools. GitHub integrations help teams work together.
In this section, we cover a GitHub app that’s a little different. It’s a tool to help individuals manage the flow of GitHub notifications. As you participate in more and more GitHub repositories, the number of notifications can start to get overwhelming. Octobox provides an email client style view of your notifications.
Installing Octobox is pretty straightforward:
- Go to https://octobox.io and scroll down to the button labeled Install the GitHub App.
Some pricing options appear, as shown in Figure 12-16. Octobox is free for open source projects.
- Click Install it for free to continue with the installation process.
- Authorize the application the same way you authorized Slack and Trello, earlier in this chapter.
After the installation and authorization steps are complete, you’re taken to your Octobox inbox. The first time it runs, it takes a moment to synchronize your notifications. When it’s done, you should see something like Figure 12-17.
After Octobox is installed and synchronized, you can use it to manage your notifications. It allows you to search and filter your notifications by repository, organization, type, action, status, and so on. You can set Octobox to automatically synchronize on an interval in its Settings page. As the status for issues and pull requests change on GitHub, synchronizing Octobox displays those changes in Octobox. Octobox also provides archiving and muting for notifications, which is a nice way of staying on top of notifications, especially if you work on multiple active projects on GitHub.
In this chapter, we note that people collaborate on a project in many places other than GitHub. For example, people may use Slack to chat about a project and Trello to manage tasks for a project. The GitHub apps for these two products pull information from GitHub into these spaces. This is useful for those who are not on GitHub as the apps may provide important context. It also helps reduce context switching as folks may not need to constantly switch back and forth from their app and GitHub.
The last app, Octobox, serves a different purpose. It is a tool that fills in a gap in the GitHub product and makes GitHub notifications more manageable. These are just three examples of the many apps that make it possible to collaborate on GitHub in contexts outside of GitHub.
Source: Guthals Sarah, Haack Phil (2019), GitHub for Dummies, Wiley.