PopHub For Mac

PopHub is a small and lightweight OS X application that enables you to view other users’ activities on your GitHub repository, alongside with all other notifications you receive.

In other words, because PopHub notifies you when other user either forks, stars, or opens a new pull request, among other things, one of your GitHub repositories, the app takes on the role of a proper GitHub feed reader.

After PopHub is installed on your Mac, it will live in OS X’s status bar, fact that makes it very unobtrusive and easy to access regardless of what other applications you have opened in that specific moment.

It must be said that, despite its compact size, PopHub seems perfectly at home installed on OS X, as it features a good looking user-interface with two main tab menus, namely Activities and Notifications.

In order to start using PopHub, you must first provide the application with your GitHub repository credentials such as username and password, and  soon after with full authorization rights.

The app will open an authorization page via your default web browser, where you will have to click the “Authorize application” button, basically empowering the application to read and write all public and private repo data, including code, issues, pull requests, wikis, settings, webhooks and services, and deploy keys.

Keeping in mind its purpose, the fact that PopHub requires such extensive permissions makes you think about possible security issues being involved. From our point of view, an application of this sort shouldn’t require more than reading permissions. 

What’s more, within PopHub’s Preferences menu, you can setup the application to launch at login, to turn-off or adjust the auto-update interval for the GitHub activities and notifications from one minute to one hour.

The app can be setup to use Notification Center alerts and to display the total number of notifications when your Mac wakes up, so you never miss a status changes in your GitHub repository.

To conclude, if you work with GitHub repositories on a daily basis and you want a seamless and convenient way to receive notifications without having to manually check for them via your web-browser, then there’s no denying that PopHub is the exact application you are looking for.