That may be Github's intention - to build a simple interface that makes it extremely easy to get your feet wet with GIT. Several of the design decisions they've made - replacing pull and push commands with Sync, automatically stashing changes when switching branches - seem to aim for the simplest possible solution, at the expense of flexibility.

I think they've done a great job on making it simple and approachable. I haven't had stability problems but it is a little sluggish on our medium-sized repo.

I think you are probably right. Especially after reading that Wired article that used Git, version control could be useful for less technical people, and G4M might be great for them, as long as it works. And it certainly looks great.

Here's a great blog post about designing Github For Mac. http://warpspire.com/posts/designing-github-mac/ Basically they didn't want to build an app that maps git commands to buttons. That doesn't make things any easier for anyone.

I think the GitHub app is fantastic, but the stability was definitely an issue. I love that I can use it without having to really know how to use git. (I can use git from the command line just fine, but find the app much nicer when it works)

Similar situation here. I am happy with the CLI, but was looking for a nice Mac GUI for our non-programmer guys. I so wish GitHub for Mac was it, because it's very simple compared to the alternatives (GitBox, SourceTree, Tower). But after trying one of the previous versions out, it routinely crashed even with common operations, so we had to pick one of the worse looking and more complex, but also better working alternatives. Will revisit GitHub for Mac later.

Sorry to hear about the crashing issues. We've done a ton of work on this release to resolve problems like that - give it a go again and see if it works for you now

SourceTree beats the pants of any other git UI I've ever used - on Mac, Linux, or Windows.

I use SourceTree too - I tried to use GitHub for Mac, but it requires a 64-bit Mac, which I don't have. Guess they're just too cool for those old systems...it would be nice if they made that clear upfront, so people could save the wasted download. [EDIT - they do point out 64-bit 10.6+ in the header, it's just gray and I didn't notice it.]

Even if SourceTree is a bit more "map the git commands onto buttons" it works well for me when I'm not on my Linux system, and the fact that it handles Hg as well is a nice bonus.

It's not git but I'd give MacHG a slight edge over SourceTree. I found SourceTree to be a little clunkier than MacHG.

MacHG looks very nice, too bad it doesn't support Git (or Github doesn't support HG)