Holla - An open source Campfire | Hacker News Reader

Holla - An open source Campfire

alexmaccaw.co.uk

141 pointsmaccman57 comments

No offense, but that custom scroll bar on the right is incredibly annoying. It's way to skinny to grab with the mouse without paying an inordinate amount of attention to my pointer.

Making a custom scroll bar that is a beautiful and unique snowflake is probably a recipe for failure. See, e.g., http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20050711.html

Google Wave... it so obvious now :)

I remember when "no more weird scroll-bars" was mentioned as one of the benefits of ditching Flash…

That's Tim Van Damme's scrollbar: http://maxvoltar.com/

It's hyper annoying. Not being able to scroll with the mouse wheel makes me really frustrated. It's things like that that make people click on the back button of the browser instantly.

It's also completely broken on the iPad... I cant scroll at all.

Ok, I get the message :) - it's gone now

Agreed. Scroll-wheel not working and a pain to grab. Annoying.

Very nice. Another nitpick - I really like what Apple have been trying to do to in creating a UI affordance that says "this is a search box" - i.e. a text entry with round ends. I hope all the devs out there can join in and not use that appearance for regular text fields.

Oh boy.. remember when Google App Engine launched with a demo (and free) app resembling Campfire? 37signals cried foul until Google took it offline. Let's hope 37s doesn't hear about this one..

To their defense, that demo did look very much like a clone of Campfire.

It was a freaking chat room!

It was a note for note cover of the 37Signals UI that was clearly designed to evoke Campfire, done by Google. What's the web chat room designed prior to Campfire that looks virtually identical to Campfire?

Every chatroom looks the same. It's like moaning that email clients steal UI from each other. Of course they do.

wasn't it Basecamp instead of Campfire?

The screenshot doesn't fit in my normal browser window and I don't get a horizontal scrollbar to pan to the right. Could just be Firefox 4 being buggy though.

Same on Chrome, but since there was no horizontal scrollbar, my initial thought was that this was intentional for some reason. (aesthetic?)

Showed fine when I maximized it, site seems designed for 1680x1050 to the detriment of anything smaller.

I must be an old curmudgeon because whenever I see Campfire I think "it's like IRC but with a better client" and wonder what the big deal is.

Sure, it's in a browser but is it really that big a deal? I just can't seem to get properly excited about Campfire and it's ilk.

Indeed. One of the things that makes me laugh as well is that 37signals themselves use Propane - which is an OS X app which gives campfire a more desktop-like experience.

IRC is still great

That it's not typically blocked by crappy Internet firewalls/filters is a big bonus. This is a big deal for me since plenty of the places I consult at tend to be a little overzealous in the "security" department.

The ability to have context on room join is the deal maker where I work. IRC doesn't work that way.

How would you feel if chatrooms like this could "bridge" into the IRC room of your choice?

(Any message in the chat room goes to the irc room, and vice versa).

The only thing I dislike about Campfire is that it doesn't support some other protocol, like XMPP or IRC, so that I can use it in a normal chat client, with normal chat client features, like desktop notifications.

This one doesn't seem to, either.

If you use OS X, try http://propaneapp.com/

Propane doesn't support IRC/XMPP/any other group chat protocol.

I did, when I was on OSX... but now I've switched back to Linux, and kinda miss it. It would be great if I could just connect to Campfire with Pidgin, or any libpurple chat client.

There is Butane for Linux: http://github.com/ricktessner/butane

Try http://jaconda.im which does exectly what you want.

Try Mibbit. It also does desktop notifications now (In Chrome).

The reason none of these new chat systems have wide protocol support is because they're really trying to improve the user experience with features like inline image previews, drag + drop file upload, archived history on the server, accessibility to non-techies, etc. Existing clients just don't support that stuff. Innovation is needed in chat UI, not protocols.

Don't get me wrong though, having these platforms be open is definitely important. I'm a co-founder of HipChat.com and while we don't openly support XMPP or IRC yet we are XMPP on the backend and plan to make it available to everyone in the future. IRC support is also something we're considering: http://help.hipchat.com/hipchat/topics/irc_compatibility.

As for getting "normal chat features" like desktop notifications, we provide our own desktop clients in addition to our web interface. Having to pay for Propane just to make Campfire usable is some weak sauce.

Github links to the demo here: http://getholla.com

great product! I love it. We currently use Jaconda.im at my office. Holla seems as good !

Only one little bug in the demo, when I click on "XMPP/Jabber" I'm redirect to http://getholla.com/$%7BgetXMPP%28%29%7D with an error (The page you were looking for doesn't exist)

Ah yes, I'm planning on adding xmpp support soon - it shouldn't have been exposed on getholla (it's stripped out of the Github version)

Please do. I'm being willing to pay for such an app with XMPP support.

Have tried Campfire, Ignite/sparkweb, all the versions of jabber I can find, and various IRC servers. So far I have not found a single one that I can successfully install on a RHEL server that will do both a web interface and an XMPP/Jabber backend so that my team can communicate effectively.

I felt so stupid for about 10 minutes repeatedly trying to find the demo username/password in this thread and the github docs. until i realized that there was a signup button...

Couple of suggestions. 1. It would make more sense to have Textbox at the bottom instead of top. When you enter something, you see your message right above your textbox.

2. Instead of having separate area for dropping files, why not allow users to drop files in the same textbox where you type your message.

3. Bubbles doesn't look nice. I mean, it looks good as a demo but not when you use the product. It is sort of a distraction. I would rather like to see zebra stripes(may be #ffffff and #f1f1f1).

4. I like to see list of users on the sidebar instead of on chat area.

Potentially stupid question, but what are zebra stripes in web design?

give different colors to alternate rows to differentiate the messages.

like http://www.alistapart.com/d/stripedtables/itunes.png

Here they use white and light blue.

When different items in a list or rows in a table have alternating colors.

Good start but it's a bit single rainbow right now.

It will take a looong time to become as useful as Campfire because all of the hooks/apps for it that already exist. Opensource is nice but Holla needs some kind of passion-creating feature/vision that would attract a decent community of contributors.

Also, good to see TaskForce ppl trying completely new things. :-)

Oh, and I have to add that I'm a 'product guy'. I do see that the tech behind it is both cutting edge and solid but I tend to drift towards the market fit thoughts whenever I see new apps.

It looks neat, but it doesn't seem to work - I joined a room, invited a coworker, and we couldn't see each others messages. Upon reload, the old messages showed up, but e.g. picture previews didn't. Is this a load problem?

Node went down unfortunately, give it another go.

The 'browse' button for finding an avatar picture on the signup page is over-flow cut-off'd in the form's container. Firefox.

I had never heard about Juggernaut -- is it any different than Socket.IO? A cursory glance indicates they are very similar.

Juggernaut uses Socket.IO. I guess it's basically an abstraction on Socket.IO, adding channel support.

My helpful alternative:

http://partychapp.appspot.com/

It's a chatroom for Google Talk.

I really like the design. Is it made for holla or for another OS project (diaspora?)?

I made it for Holla - from the jQuery Mobile mockups http://jquerymobile.com/designs

* ignore post, typing problems, my dog ate my keyboard.

Nice, but demo would be great :)

Ok, i Found it :) it's on: http://getholla.com

looks great!

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