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blog.hall.com

37 pointsbretthellman37 comments

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OT: I hate company blogs that don't have links in the top left corner back to the company's actual site.

Good call - we'll work on that today

I was also a bit confused as to why the "The Hall.com Blog" and "Home" both took you to blog.hall.com.

Know of any quality tumblr themes that handle the startup blog experience better? Or a tumblr alternative?

Wordpress. Any theme. Couple Plugins. 10x better blog.

Great Theme - http://www.studiopress.com/themes/streamline

Came here to voice this. It's not just that there ought to be a link there, it's the blog should be a "child" of your site. Instead, this makes it independent of the site and makes it feels disconnected.

Further, I have absolutely no idea what hall.com is, and I'm even more confused after trying to figure out why they wanted mobile notifications over desktop notifications. The blog post doesn't even link to hall.com either.

Probably 90% of companies' blogs don't link to the actual main site. If you encounter a startup via their blog, you have to manually go to the address bar and amputate parts from the URL.

This is one of those things I don't understand.

It seems as though a lot of companies look to the "mobile first" argument without first considering the context of their application.

In this instance, why wouldn't I work on a desktop app first? That's where my users will most likely be using the app: on a desktop. Sure, there will certainly be times when they're mobile, but what about the majority of the time? It seems especially odd when users are requesting it ad nauseam and it's a logical next step.

On a different note, I signed up for the app and it looks awesome. Can't wait to get some friends together to try it out.

Well said. Thanks for joining Hall! Product feedback/requests appreciated (hello@hall-inc.com)

@rglover, You'd think it'd be a no brainer right? Even though it may be logical and your user's have been asking for it, it is more I think cognitive dissonance, cuz you see "mobile/social apps" winning and everyone around you is doing cool consumer stuff and you get sucked into that vortex even though you know fully well you are an "enterprise app" but again there is that whole idea of making enterprise sexy and what else is more sexy right now than mobile/social....again cognitive dissonance. As Entrepreneurs it is ok to make decisions based on what your surroundings are telling you as long as you are fast enough to realize what aspects of your product work and which ones to cull and iterate onward.

What's the ROI of "sexy?" I'd ask myself that before I made any decision, especially those motivated by those around me and not my customers/users or team. You're right in that there's nothing wrong with making a decision based on your surroundings. Though, unless those surroundings are in tune with your product (i.e. other teams/companies working on enterprise products), they might as well be ambient noise. The only opinions/qualifiers that matter are those coming from your user base.

I've spent 5 minutes looking around trying to work out what your app does and I still don't really know.

@ralphsaunders we really appreciate the honest feedback. Hall is collaboration for your company and team. Our current product is the War Room which enables team collaboration (chat, video, file sharing, rt notes) all in one place.

We hope you'll give us another chance by creating a war room for your team and letting us know what you think. Thanks! brett @ hall-inc.com

Apparently it's exactly like SGI InPerson, without the 3D model sharing and 15 years later :) Actually it looks pretty neat and it's great that we finally have all features from my Indy on modern systems :)

I'd recommend changing the hero text on your main site's home page to something like "Hall is collaboration for your company and team, all in one place" from the current "Working Together in War Rooms Doubles Teams' Productivity", then.

"War rooms" as a concept already exist outside the context of your app; when I first saw the site, I didn't understand how the statement connected to your app. I thought it was just a generic statement about war rooms, which was confusing.

Really appreciate the feedback. We'll be iterating on the landing page soon to keep up with the actual product inside.

This seems like it could be cool, but for it to replace Skype for me it needs to have screen sharing.

Also, I don't really like being pestered to connect Facebook and LinkedIn at every turn. I'm wary of annoying my friends, and I especially don't want to send invites to everyone on Facebook and LinkedIn without trying out the app first. When I do send invites, it will only be to a few co-workers not all my contacts so uncheck everyone by default please.

Does anyone know what they used for the GUI? Is it QT?

We're using Adobe Air/HTML5/Jquery/Backbone.js/CSS.

You're doomed

y? do tell

@sohn, care to elaborate?

Why don't you give them real feedback? This site thrives on collaboration not "one-liners" like what you provided.

Politely: I won't install an Adobe Air app unless forced to by me employer. Maybe that's how this will work, but Air is always a drag in my personal experience.

Again, it would be great to get feedback on exactly why it's a drag.

Because it's Yet Another Runtime that I Don't Want to Have to Install and Maintain.

I have yet to see an AIR application that is truly cross-platform functional. They run, but that doesn't mean that I want to spend time in them.

I hadn't heard of hall.com before this post, but while I appreciate that (a) you've done this out of response to your users (good) and (b) you've done this because it's faster than doing something else, (c) I don't install AIR.

These days, I only want .apps that include everything I need inside of the app bundle and don't require external installations. (I say this as someone shipping a USB stick with an app that, to apply an update of the app on the stick from the Mac, you have to have a driver installed. I don't want that driver, but I have to. Can't stand it.)

Excellent! Thanks for the feedback. That's the type of useful information we need.

Hopefully you'll consider switching to Titanium Desktop.

There are many reasons, but the most important one is supporting Linux, since Adobe killed Air for Linux.

Thanks for the tip. We did consider Titanium but heard from several startups stories about Titanium being very hard to debug.

At work we use one of your competitors, HipChat. They also have supposed Linux support via Adobe Air. Air just flat won't work with 64-bit Ubuntu(1). There are mystical voodoo rituals documented by lay practitioners (with names like UbutnuFan2732) which, surprisingly, don't work. The truth is that Adobe doesn't support it, so if you're lucky enough to get an Air App running on Linux it probably won't last.

(1) I would imagine 64-bit Ubuntu is not rare. What are you Air app developers testing on?

You're shackling yourselves to a platform from a vendor widely known for bloated and buggy products. You can expect the strangest and most bizarre bugs ever. Here's an example from today: I updated flash to its latest version and now youtube videos have their red and blue channel swapped. But only when using hardware video acceleration. Or how about Machinarium - it's also based on flash and is unplayably slow, but only when run fullscreen. When run in a window, it's perfect.

You should really sit back and think hard whether you can replace Air with something like python+qt+... or perhaps java (well, the jvm+libraries, you can still write in jython or clojure or whatever's hot these days). I'm sure there must be a platform to suit your needs that isn't Air.

In the short term, Adobe Air provides you with the shortest time to get you product to market, but I agree that it should/cannot be a longterm solution, anything short of writing you app in native code IMHO is making yourself held hostage to these runtime environments and their quirks.

Congrats! It's very sleek and awesome just like the the hall website.

Thanks Rob - please let us know if you have any product feedback/requests! hello @ hall-inc.com

Honest question from an aspiring entrepreneur: How do you plan to stay afloat/relevant when Apple has made it clear they are targeting platform integrated notifications in Mountain Lion?

@lbotos if your talking about Apple's Messages (I guess you could call it a platform), it would actually make applications like Hall.com even more powerful. Now if you are talking about Hall.com competing with iChat(or Messages or whatever apple chooses to call it), then I believe instant messaging is only one part of Hall.com's abilities. I believe platforms like Hall.com and its ilk will drive the next generation of collab tools taking what IM's, IRC's, Email clients etc has done very well and either complement them or disrupt them.

Honest Feedback:

I missed the majority of what Hall does. This blogpost was really tailored to people who wanted that feature implemented. I thought you only were a notifications app, not a full collaborative platform. Sorry for any confusion caused by my oversight!

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