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Comment by GordonS | Hacker News Reader

+1 for Teams. Video calling actually works great, but gods the UX is appalling! It's just so confusing and inconsistent.

As you said too, the whole thing is buggy. Sometimes screen sharing doesn't work unless you reopen the app, for example.

The wiki feature is crap (at least the web version, I haven't tried the desktop version of the wiki) - formatting is a mess, markdown support is practically non-existent, it's buggy as hell, and so unbelievably slow.

If they had a feature freeze and concentrated on overhauling the UI and fixing the bugs, it could actually be a great product... but as it is, it's loathsome.

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The desktop wiki feature is awful, but it's awful in the same way that any of the pseudo-markdown for setting in teams is awful. The WYSIWYG editor constantly doesn't recognize backtick monospace formatting, or is overzealous in hijacking the cursor when you are trying to type adjacent to monospace formatting. The enter key seemingly arbitrarily makes either newlines or continues to the next section. I've spent a few hours writing wiki entries this last week and it does not spark joy to the point where I wonder if anybody who works on Teams wiki functionality actually has used it.

That problem with the enter key making it jump around sections is there in the web version too! A few weeks back I spent a lot of time compiling a wiki, and that combined with the lag of the web version absolutely drove me nuts!

The screen sharing one has bitten me a couple of times. I record live classes for students, and we've had occasions when someone who was away goes back to the video and it's a black screen with me nattering away as if they can see it :/

That said, apart from the shitty embedding support and their channel management, I REALLY like Stream and using it for a video lesson platform. The captioning is quite good even for my fast talking, Aussie accent and jargon.

Ah yes, I noticed the live CC recently! I tried it out in a conf call between myself (very Scottish accent), a Swede, a Norwegian, an Indian and an American - it really was amazingly accurate for everyone!

That said, beyond novelty I'm not sure how useful a CC feature is.

Some of my students tell me I talk too fast, so it can be helpful for them to review content, and I've had quite a few students with varying degrees of hearing impairment. Pretty useful in my field.

Massively helpful to me, a deaf person.

And at least on macOS screen sharing doesn't work with a German keyboard layout. Neither the German nor the US keyboard layout modifiers work correctly. At least it is enough to bootstrap a better remote desktop connection.

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