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Comment by Justsignedup | Hacker News Reader

From the perspective of the author. This is fantastic work. Keep up the enthusiasm, and I hope to see more from you.

From the perspective of google, they should have done this 3 years ago. The chrome hangouts plugin is an atrocity. But at this point I've already fully abandoned google hangouts except for video chats at work. Too little, too late.

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Strongly agree. I discovered YakYak a couple weeks ago and haven't looked back at the plugin or native apps. For those curious why people may not like the alternatives:

Chrome Plugins/Apps:

- Cmd-tab doesn't work properly with apps. It will bring up my browser window instead.

- My browser has to be open. Chrome has a large battery impact even when just sitting there. I often completely close Chrome when roaming. YakYak barely even registers

Pidgin/Adium:

- You don't see missed messages from when you weren't logged in. I used to get in lots of fights with my girlfriend because of missed messages.

- Can't paste images/screenshots from the clipboard. Maybe Pidgin supported this? Adium doesn't.

- History isn't shared between multiple computers (chat history on home PC isn't available on work PC)

YakYak solves all of those problems for me. I am thrilled YakYak exists. Huge thanks to the author.

If you prefer pidgin/adium: https://bitbucket.org/EionRobb/purple-hangouts

Basically implements full hangouts into pidgin (connects to hangouts over "hangups" protocol rather than xmpp).

It still has some minor issues. from finch (ncurses pidgin) for example, it makes links that send people to a blank page with some hangouts.google.com/ proxy stuff going on that never gets followed. it also has weird issues with instantly marking some conversations as read. Otherwise I've been viewing it as an inplace upgrade for using xmpp on pidgin.

No Mac support? or is it just not documented?

Adium is the pidgin for Mac.

There was a comment on the bitbucket a long while ago about "how to build for adium" but i no longer see that. :(

> Cmd-tab doesn't work properly with apps. It will bring up my browser window instead

try Cmd-`

That only works if I already have Chrome in the foreground. If I cmd-tab to another app to copy something, and then cmd-tab back to the Hangouts Chrome App to paste it but it actually just shows me my browser window instead. There is no way to swap back and forth between the Hangouts Chrome App like every other app even though it has a dedicated Dock icon.

For me, one of the biggest draws over the official client are that it opens links in my OS default browser, not just Chrome. They used to do this, but have made changes so that links only open in Chrome. There's a smattering of threads on this issue with no response from Google or the Hangouts team.

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