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Comment by tiffanyh | Hacker News Reader

Zulip UI polished.

https://chat.zulip.org

For those not aware, Zulip has been polishing it's UI to make it feel fresher - yet keep the high info density it's known for.

Check it out live at the link above.

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EDIT:

What I'd love to see is Zulip:

- stop using 'globe' icons, and instead us '#' (the industry has settled on '#', so might as well embarrass it)

- update the color scheme/theme (or allow users to define their own color theme)

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Just to clarify something: Zulip decorates streams with icons hinting the size of the audience for the stream, which can be helpful for considering the level of care that you might want to use in writing your messages.

In particular, Zulip uses hash icons for public streams open to all members of the organization, lock icons for private streams, and globe icons for web-public streams (https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option). So if you're seeing only globe icons, it's because you're in an organization where you only have access to web-public streams.

See https://zulip.com/help/stream-permissions for more details.

Sorry, I'm being serious, what's the "polished" part referring to?

I've checked Zulip out a few weeks back and it's just the same outdated, quirky look and feel.

Sorry for a confusion. I’m a designer behind refreshments of Zulip UI. UI update is in progress. Slowly parts of Zulip UI are replaced after careful internal test if people feel that is a good thing. So far there are small changes. The bigger parts like compose box, left sidebar, message typography, marketing website and mobile apps are coming.

You can participate in evaluation of redesigns if you join zulip dev chat.

My favorite chat app and great people. Its weakest point is the mobile client. The way attachments work is a distant second. Still I would not use anything else.

Thanks for the kind words!

For those curious, Zulip is deep into rewriting our mobile apps in Flutter (https://github.com/zulip/zulip-flutter). It's hard to predict the timing for that type of project, but the goal is to be able to replace the existing React Native mobile apps around the end of the year. We've been thrilled with the Flutter platform, both the technology and the community -- it's been just incredibly pleasant to contribute fixes for issues that are important to us to the upstream project, so they're fixed for everyone.

I'd be curious to hear what you don't like about Zulip's attachments work -- I'm not sure what you have in mind.

They probably need to optimise the code so it doesn't take 8-10 seconds of watching a spinner to load that page.

Once it does load, I can't see a way to pin a particular thread to the head of the list. So does everything just get shunted down when a new thread arrives?

If you look back at old Usenet software like pan, they had the UX of multiple threads in multiple groups nailed. I would contend that would be a good pattern to imitate.

Something's off with their use of webfonts - https://i.imgur.com/sY6vUbj.png

That aside, their info density is really good.

That's super odd.

I'd suggest filing a bug report at:

https://github.com/zulip/zulip/issues

What browser, OS, browser plugins (like adblocker) are you running?

It definitely looks nicer than I remember it, but the information density still overwhelms me.

Tbh, this is kinda ugly.

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