Flock, fast and free team messenger | Hacker News Reader

Flock, fast and free team messenger

flock.co

143 pointschang230159 comments

This post got a huge number of bogus upvotes. We ban accounts and sites that do that, so please don't do it again.

We're sorry about this. It wasn't our intention to promote bogus upvotes. We're guessing as word spread throughout our group of companies, people got excited and up-voted. We’re definitely going to be more careful about this in the future.

If you want this to be a good Slack competitor, please make a native mac client which doesn't perpetually take 15% of my CPU the way Slack does - i'd convince our team to switch on that basis alone (all else being equal).

I get why you are saying that, and we are working hard to ensure that our CPU/memory usage stays low. We aren't there yet, but hopefully we should soon be at a point where this is no longer a concern. (Not denying that Webkit based apps have some overhead already, but we are trying to keep the remaining overhead low).

That said, there's a significant advantage to using this approach -- you don't need to build different apps for different desktop platforms, plus it also helps to have same UI across platforms, which is why we went for this.

Yeah, and that's completely understandable. However, Slack on my ultraportable Windows laptop just brings the hardware to a halt. I get better performance by just keeping a tab open in my browser so I go with that.

I know it's pros/cons and it helps you push out builds but, man, webkit apps are terrible. On the plus side, the Mac update that was pushed out not that long ago was pretty nice.

EDIT: Oh, you're not from Slack; you're the CTO of Flock. I'm a little tipsy so whoops. What's the difference between Slack and Flock? I didn't really see too much of a difference at first glance.

> What's the difference between Slack and Flock?

We get asked that a lot, so much that we made made a video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDDapdpgCd8 :-)

Here's a summary:

1) Flock is faster and slicker 2) Routine tasks (searching contacts, looking at the most recent messages across conversations, keyboard shortcuts, etc.) are much easier 3) Our API platform, FlockOS, is much more powerful compared to Slack's (see https://docs.flock.co)

This reasoning is essentially "it's easier for us". I have to use slack for work and it is extraordinarily frustrating to have to use such a ridiculously slow and resource intensive application for sending text messages in 2016. Coupled with the non-native UI (can I right click on that message? Oh no - it's a web page, let's find the cog to click on). Saying that it allows the UI to be the same on every platform to me means that it is not good on any platform. I would take IRC over slack any day at this point.

Oops, also read your message as being from Slack!

No issues, your criticism is still valid. We are working hard towards fixing these issues.

I have evaluated and ditched many messengers over time, and frankly: If you don't offer a native client that keeps itself at <100 Mb usage, and an absolute minimum of CPU usage when not in use, you get relegated to being installed on a trash phone used only for responding to absolute emergencies and even then only with letting the sender know how much i disapprove of their use of the software. I've moved many of my friends and business partners off such disrespectful software over the years, even some who worked on said messengers.

You can try and tweak and fiddle knobs in a website running in a chrome-less browser all day, but you'll NEVER get into an acceptable performance range for an ever-present background process.

And if you can't get there, you don't deserve being used.

Yes, it's cheaper for you. But the costs you pass on to your users (and the environment) are astronomical.

Edit: Also, the spacing in your UI layout looks fine for promotional purposes, but is extremely wasteful and useless for involved conversation, particularly of a technical nature where referring back to earlier bits of the convo is important.

I recognize several of the people in your front page screenshot [1]. They are well-known in the design community.

Did you get permission to use their photographs?

[1] http://imgur.com/a/nWbtt

we use http://uifaces.com/ for our mocks and screenshots, and these are all pre-authorised images. However, if anyone from the community doesn’t want their pic up, we’ll be happy to take it down.

(I manage the marketing at Flock, and happy to answer any more questions you may have)

Is Accenture really a customer? Whirlpool?

These are absolutely huge names -- how have I not heard of this before?

> 25000+ COMPANIES AROUND THE WORLD USE FLOCK

A lot of Show HN apps/websites using big companies logo, not sure why it is legal to do so, when I believe all is for marketing.

And I hope they will response to your comment.

it happens, and the legalities really vary from company to company. a few years ago there was the "startup logo generator" or something like that here on HN it got so bad.

also, let's say I work for Staples in customer support. Me and my 3 buddies use Flock to communicate at work using Flock, and send files back and forth...now "Staples uses Flock."

Yes, and? When you build a product hoping for bottom-up user adoption (as opposed to getting the CtO to make a company wide mandate) then its totally fair to do this. Half the hosting companies on earth have Disney and NewsCorp and Nike and Starbucks logos on their client pages because an employee used his work email to buy a $5 shared hosting account for his mom's blog.

We have active users from both these companies.

We launched our product a year and a half ago at SXSW in Austin, but it’s only recently that we’ve started aggressively marketing it.

This year, we were at Techcrunch Disrupt, NY and SF and currently exhibiting at TNW Momentum, NY. Do drop by our booth, if you happen to be in the city.

tl;dr of difference to Slack: a) 2.5x faster to load initially than Slack, b) UI that will "sweep you of your feet", c) seamless app integration

(according to them)

Also apps are a lot more powerful in flock. In slack you can only interact with apps using slash commands. In flock, an app can declare UI buttons in multiple places which can trigger actions like opening a widget or sending events to app backend. You can also include widgets inside your messages (e.g. checkout our polls app). Read our API docs for more: https://docs.flock.co/

(PS: I work in the Flock android team)

You may want to rethink how you differentiate Flock from Slack

https://api.slack.com/docs/message-buttons

Flock supports message buttons too. And also buttons for apps across the UI, more on that here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zQfbeh_gKk -- Not just that, you can craft your own custom UI in an inline attachment widget which can do whatever you want (for e.g. take a look at polls app)

And finally, apps are first class citizens in Flock, which means they have much deeper integration with UI widgets. You can have an app show its own UI right inside Flock, Our To-DO app for instance, is an app anyone could build to extent what Flock can do.

More on our platform here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zQfbeh_gKk

( P.S : I work in the flock android team )

Proudly built in India - http://indianexpress.com/article/technology/social/flock-the...

Good going @chaitanya - can you talk about the technology stack choices ? Clojure ?

Quick question - how does one migrate ? can you pull all data out of hipchat/slack ?

Sorry no Lisp or Clojure here ;-)

Our backend is mostly Java, the desktop app is based on HTML/CSS/Javascript while the mobile apps are native.

We are working on a migration tool from Slack (and others) to Flock, we will release it soon.

java 8 + lambda by any chance ? we have been considering kotlin + vertx for some time now... so it would be interesting to hear about your experience in the vanilla java world.

Our core infra doesn't use lambda (we can't really, its not a good fit). However, I think for some of our ancillary services and especially for a lot of FlockOS apps (https://apps.flock.co), it makes a lot of sense.

Just yesterday in fact, I was at AWS dev day in Pune where I explained how easy it is to build a FlockOS app using lambda and node.js. We will put up a blog post on it soon.

Actually I was not talking about AWS Lambda...but Java 8 "lambdas" (streams,lombok,lambdas...the whole shebang)

Arghh.. yes of course we do make use of lambda expressions in Java!

Looks neat. Small UI comment on the landing page: the header of the columns looks exactly like the links so I initially clicked on Flock OS wondering what it was before realising it wasn't a link.

What's the stack behind it (frontend/backend)?

PS: tried to open the FlockOS blog to see what it was and all I see is an empty Medium page?

Thanks for the feedback, we will fix the styling. Also, I think someone was a little too eager to link to the FlockOS blog, we will remove it.

Our backend is mostly Java, the desktop app is based on HTML/CSS/Javascript while the mobile apps are native.

as a developer, I was curious to read about building apps for flock. let me tell you about my experience: first, I had to create an account. I just wanted to get some information, but ok. after entering an email (in firefox), getting a pin via email, entering the pin, I got redirected to a page that said: "No account set yet." I tried to sign in via https://web.flock.co/, where it told me that firefox wasn't supported. So I tried the same steps with chrome, where it told me "Access Denied", and I need to contact developer support.

Maybe you guys are not ready yet? Or where can a developer get some information about creating apps for your platform?

I am sorry you had to face this, we are aware of this issue and are fixing it. We have only just opened up our API platform (FlockOS) for external developers, and we are mostly reaching out to them via hackathons, where we make the steps required very clear. I hadn't imagined us getting HNed right now :-|

So the issue is that you need to sign up before you can access the developer dashboard, and you can only do that through a Flock client as of now. Unfortunately, as you found out, our web client doesn't support Firefox and that's basically hit our worst case scenario with this issue.

If you want to try it out, you can sign up using web.flock.co on Chrome or Safari, or download one of our clients. Once you do that you will be able to sign in to https://dev.flock.co. The documentation for building apps is on https://docs.flock.co.

If you are curious about how Flock compares to Slack (we get that a lot), we made a short video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDDapdpgCd8

Is this a native app or Electron? Electron is super slow and was a mistake.

I thought so too until I used VScode and no I'm not sure anymore.

It's a hybrid app , but we use nw.js instead of electron. nw.js is a lot faster than electron.

We don't use Electron, but its the same principle. The desktop app is written using HTML/CSS/Javascript running inside a webview.

I get why people hate Electron based apps, and we are working hard to ensure that Flock keeps its footprint as low as possible given our architecture (there's a significant advantage in building one desktop app instead of three different ones). We are not there yet, but soon we should reach a point where our CPU/memory usage is not a concern.

Any reason for terming Electron app as slow? The best i could find was https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/5672

Invalid email: http://imgur.com/a/Xo2mS

Wondering why people still check for 'valid' email addresses.

Whoops! We have a very permissive email regex, your address should have passed. Can you tell me where exactly this check failed? (edit: I got it, we will get this fixed quickly)

Check... Thanks. Saw the new verification email.

This is really great! It has all the features I need. Going to get my team to start using this right away. EVERY team should be using this product.

Thank you sir!

Are there any plans to add video calls or screen sharing as a feature? Having those work cross platform would be a huge advantage over other existing messaging applications.

Flock supports video calling and screen sharing via appear.in and Google Hangouts integration. And it works cross platform too. We don't have anything native yet.

(PS: I work in the Flock android team)

You have some copy duplication at the bottom of the page in the press area, PCWorld and ComputerWorld both have the same "Meet flock [...] productivity gains" text.

This was a little unexpected, but glad to see Flock featured on HN's front page!

(I am the CTO of Flock, and will be happy to answer any of your queries).

Congrats! Flock vs Slack reminds me of Zendesk vs Freshdesk. Any thought on fundraising? Investors would beg to get in :)

Thank you for your kind words. We are currently flush with funds, however we are certainly open to raising future rounds externally and will be doing so.

(Founder and CEO, Flock)

Awesome! When you raise your next round keep me posted - zillionize at gmail dot com.

Hi, congratulations on your release! Where can I find the source code to inspect?

It doesn't seem to be open source.

Maybe try Mattermost if you want something similar that's open Free.

https://www.mattermost.org

does anyone know why people do not use mattermost instead of slack&co? it seems to have everything in place, and it's free and opensource.. is it beacuse you need to deploy by yourself?

We use it along with the GitLab omnibus package so install and setup was very straightforward. It's great and has handled everything we've thrown at it; no complaints whatsoever.

Sorry, Flock isn't open source. We will open source some of our libraries in the near future though :-)

wow, that's a shame! Sorry to hear that.

I'm rather curious, what's preventing you from supporting Firefox?

Nothing actually, we just want to make sure the Firefox build is fully tested before releasing it. We will be launching it soon.

Awesome. Best of luck with the product.

Like the ui. The mobile app is nice. Works seamlessly on ubuntu with chrome extension. Have not seen a situation where I have ran out of cpu cycles. I have an i5. Its nice. I have faced one challenge though a few times, that is, it takes a little while to reconnect when u bring the laptop out of suspend. It connects eventually but u wait like for 15 seconds before u can start. It is not a deal breaker though :) good job. Keep going.

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