| This is beautiful and clearly very useful. Some thoughts: * Business-wise, your main risk is that GitHub agrees how useful this is and builds much of the same features. In a sense, GitHub can improve in this manner, by taking the best features of external services and implementing them directly. * The killer app here would be if you can integrate this into an IDE. In other words, the annotations are great for code-review, but not just code-review. In general they are essentially better comments. Wouldn't it be great if I saw those annotations whilst coding? I understand that it's not as if you personally could create plug-ins for all existing IDEs. But could you have an API to make that possible for third-parties to author said plug-ins? * Integrated with code-analysis software could make for a very pleasing automated-code-review service. For example, with Python you could annotate the source with the output of pylint. Obviously, I'm not suggesting that this replaces manual code-review, just that it would be a nice addition. I mean you already have the automated annotations highlighting where a line was affected by a pull-request. * The tour was really nice, but whenever I was asked to "go ahead and click on the annotation" this did not really work, mostly it just advanced the tour. On that note, it would be good if the tour suggested how far was to go. |
Yes, an API is coming very soon. And hopefully soon after that, some open-source editor integrations based on that API. Do you have an editor/IDE you prefer?
Integrated code-analysis would be cool, but it gets into a messy, language specific area that I'd like to avoid for the time being (these tools can be...flaky...when run at at scale, on lots of strange repos). But I'd like to find a solution -- either, again, via API, or possibly by some sort of jenkins-like service that allows you to run any particular tool you want, and attach the output to the code as annotations. I'd like Omniref to really be a "universal reference" for your code -- not just code review comments, but any sort of information that is relevant to lines of code.
Regarding the tour bug: could you send me an email (tim@omniref.com) with a screenshot of what you saw before/after clicking the annotation button? It might be a client-specific bug.