News

• 1: Introducing Tags and Filtering in PR Focus!
• 2: Introducing PR Focus - track PRs you care about, and ignore the rest!
• 3: PR Focus 1.0 Public Beta

1 - Introducing Tags and Filtering in PR Focus!

PR Focus is pleased to introduce a roundup of new features requested by users: Tags, Filters, and new Accessibility Settings!

Track related work through tags

A team lead requested the ability to assign tags to pull requests in PR Focus, and then view PRs where those tags had been assigned. Their use case was:

• I want to privately track pull requests based on some criteria I assign, without using GitHub labels. I want this info to be visible only to me.
• I want a way to view all pull requests associated with that criteria.
• I want to share info with stakeholders on a specific cadence - weekly, monthly, or quarterly.

This use case is very relatable, and once I got the request, it became obvious how widely applicable this could be!

• Track a specific feature implementation across pull requests - even across repositories - with tags!
• Track an important initiative through tags.
• Track the work for a specific release through tags.
• Track pull requests related to a specific customer through tags.

My team immediately has uses for this functionality, so it was one of the first things I wanted to add after the v1.0 launch.

With v1.1, you can:

• Create, edit, and delete Tags
• Apply tags to pull requests (and remove them)
• View all tagged pull requests in a special Tagged PRs dashboard
• Filter to see only the PRs related to a specific tag
• Apply date filters to see PRs in a specific date range related to a specific tag

To get started with Tags, check out the Tagged PRs documentation.

Automatically Watch, Ignore, or Apply Tags through user-defined filters

Another beta tester requested the ability to define filters to automatically ignore pull requests. The requester wanted to be able to automatically ignore Snyk dependency update PRs. But it’s easy to see a lot of uses for manual filters, such as:

• The ability to automatically Watch or Ignore PRs from a specific user
• The ability to automatically Watch or Ignore PRs based on keywords in the Title or Description - a specific naming pattern, for example, such as “Bug”
• The ability to automatically Ignore all PRs where you’re not the PR author. PR Focus overrides Ignore when you become a Reviewer or Assignee, so there’s no chance you’ll miss an important PR. If you don’t care about the other work in a repository, this can save you time over manually Watching or Ignoring PRs.

When you combine it with the requsted tagging feature, it also seemed like a great opportunity to automatically apply tags based on some criteria.

With v1.1, you can:

• Create, edit, and delete Filters.
• Filters can Watch or Ignore PRs, or apply a Tag.
• Incoming PRs automatically have Filters applied.

PR Focus does not retroactively apply filters.

To get started with Filters, check out the Filter PRs documentation.

New Accessibility Settings

During launch week, a user requested settings to override the glyphs that display for pull request status and review status. This release provides new accessibility settings to override the glyphs and display their text representations in the relevant views.

To get started with the new accessibility settings, check out the Settings documentation.

What’s next?

The PR Focus website GitHub repository has templates for users to request features or file bug reports for the app. Feel free to leave a feature request for the PR Focus app on the website repository.

The next planned work includes some feature requests more focused on the developer’s individual contributor workflows, including a dashboard dedicated to contributor PRs - where you’re the PR author, a Reviewer, or an Assignee. But I’ve also got some of my own planned feature work that I think you’re going to like. Enough to keep improving PR Focus for the foreseeable future!

Help spread the word!

If you find PR Focus useful, please help spread the word! This app is currently one dev’s side project, and my reach is limited. I’d love to help more people find PR Focus, so if you have found it useful, I’d love it if you can:

• Tell people you know about the app. Maybe they’ll find it useful, too!
• Leave a rating or review on the App Store. This really helps!
• Let me know what you’ve found most useful about PR Focus. I have my own reasons for using it, but some of my beta testers use it in wildly different ways. The better I understand what people find useful about it, the better I can communicate about it to other folks who might find it useful!

2 - Introducing PR Focus - track PRs you care about, and ignore the rest!

Introducing PR Focus - a macOS app that makes it easy to watch important pull requests across repositories through information-rich dashboards. PR Focus launched on August 5, 2024, and is available through Apple’s App Store. Developed by Dachary Carey, PR Focus helps developers, technical writers, team leads, project managers, and agencies track changes to important pull requests.

GitHub’s notifications just don’t provide the granular configuration options to make them useful. Tracking changes through email can become a firehose of missed and ignored messages. Tickets in third-party systems, such as Jira or Trello, often don’t reflect the reality of the state of the code. PR Focus is designed to provide quick access to the source of truth - the code. The PR Focus dashboards highlight important changes to important PRs, and they get anything that isn’t important out of your way.

• Find out when you’ve been tagged as a reviewer or assignee. See when there are changes to pull requests you’ve already reviewed, so you can tell when you may need to take another look.
• See when people review your PRs. Know when it’s time for you to go back to the pull request - or see if people aren’t reviewing and you need to remind them.
• Find out when people make pull requests to your open source repositories that you don’t visit very often. No more missing PRs for months.
• If you’re dependent on work someone else is doing, Watch the pull request and find out when it gets updated, reviewed, merged - or quickly check it’s status at any time.

Watch repositories. New pull requests come into your Inbox. Choose whether to Watch or Ignore them. The ignored PRs get out of your way and you never have to look at them again - unless you become a reviewer or assignee, when they automatically move back to your main dashboards. The watched PRs remain visible, automatically updating and letting you know when there’s new information.

With PR Focus, you’ll never miss an important pull request again.

3 - PR Focus 1.0 Public Beta

The PR Focus 1.0 release candidate is available for public beta testing! This is the final planned build before the 1.0 release. You can give PR Focus a try and enjoy the full range of features planned for launch. Spots are limited! Join the beta through this TestFlight Public Beta Group. I welcome any bug reports or feature requests!

I’ve already got plans for the first post-1.0 features, which include:

• Apply tags to PRs in PR Focus, independent of any GitHub labels. Think of them as private labels!
  • A new dashboard enables you to filter PRs by your applied tags, and an optional date range. Use it to generate reports on key initiatives or highlight the work your team is doing.
  • Easily keep track of feature or release-specific work across repositories.
• Filter PRs to automatically Watch, Ignore, or apply tags based on keywords or the PR author.
• Search for PRs by keyword or PR author.
• Customization options for what dashboards to see in the sidebar, and how to organize them.

These are all feature requests that have come through the public beta so far. I’ve also squashed six bugs. I really appreciate all the great ideas and all the bug reports!