Show HN: QuicklyChat - A video walkie-talkie for the workplace | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: QuicklyChat - A video walkie-talkie for the workplace

quicklychat.com

110 pointsjmharvey48 comments

You've actually tried to solve one of my personal frustrations, which is good. My biz partner and I do a lot of work remotely while running continuous video.

Skype, which should be the "obvious solution", is a wreck. Every 15 minutes the app goes into some sort of CPU loop consuming >100% cpu on my MBP. It destroys my productivity. Restarting every 15 mins is not going to happen. After a dozen software updates they seem to only be able to make the problem worse.

Facetime is hopeless. Lots of CPU, retarded upright-iphone aspect ratio. Also has problems staying connected.

Google Hangout is ok. It's our current solution. It's something like ten mouse-clicks to get a session started, and drops the connection every couple hours. Still, it's the least annoying solution.

I tried QuicklyChat... and it didn't work. Not even close. Trouble connecting to my partner, trouble getting sound or video working when connected. The UX was terrible. It's way too raw to be called "beta". Sorry.

Re: FaceTime on the desktop: If you point at the local video preview thumbnail, a button for changing the orientation of the video you're sending from portrait to landscape will appear. If both you and your conversation partner do this, the problem you describe goes away.

I've never noticed a lot of CPU use from FaceTime, personally.

Why don't you have a video showing exactly how the chat looks and works? I don't want to download something to see how it works.

Same here, I downloaded, and it requires Adobe Air, then I stopped...

What's wrong with Air? I've used other apps built on it and they work fine (such as balsamiq).

Nothing wrong. Just that I don't have it on my machine and don't want to install air to try the software.

This is fantastic. I love the status indicators. I would go one step further and show little, live thumbnails of each person on your contact list—sure, you might get caught picking your nose, but that could happen when working with people in real life, and I see these tools as trying to make remote working as real as possible. Live thumbnails would be a very natural way to check if someone is at their computer, on the phone, too busy or stressed looking to disrupt.

Live thumbnails are in development. We're working on balancing privacy with utility (we don't want to accidentally expose the text of emails, for example).

I think he meant a live thumbnail size video stream of each person.

I like this idea, good pitch on the page, but it's absolutely critical that it just works. I installed it, opened it, at first it wasn't obvious if I had to make an account, use an existing service, or what, but I finally noticed the create an account and tried to make account in which it says couldn't connect with video server, I tried again and it says account already registered with no apparent change in the form.

After this I closed out, and under any other circumstances I'll never go back and try again. GChat seems to solve this problem for me already but I was tempted to try this out but it just didn't work with the flow and interaction on the first try and to me that's a deal breaker.

So tl;dr for you and anyone else, your product has to absolutely work and must initially make sense flow wise for your first time users. Especially if you're in a market that has many other solutions because getting me to go back find the application and try again sometime in the future is going to be really hard.

Sorry to hear that the account creation process didn't work out for you. Based on your description and our server logs, I have a good sense of what broke for you, and it's a case we've never run into before when testing, but we're working on fixing that bug now.

I agree that it's absolutely critical that it just works, and in this case, it didn't just work for you. From all the traffic today, we found a bunch of new bugs that didn't show up in our testing, so we're working as fast as we can to fix them and fix our testing process so we find similar issues.

Hehe and this is great :)

I sat through a brutal pitch practice session this afternoon and I was in the criticism mode.

Please add a symbol to red and green so they are differentiable to R/G colorblind people

8% of North American males are Red/Green colorbind

Perhaps thumbs up/sideways/down, or Octagon, square, circle

Good call, hadn't thought of that.

But it's red on green or green on red, not differentiation between the two? I have r/g color blindness, I can't see red berries against green foliage, but I can tell red from green easily.

I'll explain what the difference is here. I suggest all software developers learn to use something like http://www.vischeck.com/ on their UIs:

The colors "Green" and "Red" aren't visible at all to R/G colorblind people. There are actually two different types of cone deficiencies (for R/G colorblindness, the most common one), missing red cones, and missing green cones (Deuteranope and Protanope). Turns out, it doesn't really matter that much which one you're missing, as the world looks much the same to you: All yellow and blue. There are some differences, which do mean the specific yellows you see are different from the other type of R/G colorblind, but for software developers, both types of common colorblindness can be lumped together: Only use Yellow and Blue as indicator colors, or colors that clearly go to yellow or blue, or use secondary markers.

For severe cases, the colors you see are pretty much only yellow and blue. For less severe cases, the person actually is only missing SOME of the red or SOME of the green cones, and can tell some colors, but not very well.

There is also a Tritanope which actually has problems distinguishing blue/yellow, but they're VERY rare.

normal color vision: http://www.vischeck.com/images//hats_norm_big.jpg

Each type of R/G colorblindness: http://www.vischeck.com/images//hats_deutan_big.jpg http://www.vischeck.com/images//hats_protan_big.jpg

Vischeck.com (which I'm just a frequent user of) will also Daltonize images for you. What daltonization does it it takes colors in an image and moves them around in the different color spaces to make it so both normally color sighted and color deficient users can see everything.

I am not an expert, but merely a software dev who tries to do right by the color deficient, 8% of North american males.

So the main selling point for this is that it automatically detects when someone is working. Besides that, how is it different than skype or google video chat? Wouldn't it be cooler/better to write a status plugin for google chat that automatically determines if you are busy or not?

In QuicklyChat, when you're available and receive a video chat, your client automatically answers it, and the video appears in an unobtrusive notification window in the corner of your screen. We think this better captures the dynamic of a coworker walking up to your desk and being in your peripheral vision.

Most other video chat clients pop up an answer dialog which steals focus, and makes your computer ring, and that immediately interrupts you from what you're doing, whereas when people walk up to your desk, they generally wait until you acknowledge, or use body language/visual cues to determine whether it's a good time to interrupt.

I installed this, but it turns my video camera on at seemingly random times. Uninstalled rapidly.

Sorry that it didn't work for you. There's a bug which happens occasionally for some computers where we try to connect to the camera and fail and retry, and it looks like that's what you ran into. We're working on fixing it right now.

I felt nervous using an installer on my Mac, but when I go to my PC later today I'll try that version. Sounds like a cool concept.

I'm curious why you are nervous to install software on OSX? Mac installers should generate a log of everything that has been placed/modified on your computer.

Bad experiences in the past of having to remove many different files from different places.

There are apps that do that now, AppZapper, etc.

I wish I didn't have to pay for another app to uninstall other apps :/

There are free ones too?

Windows and Unix have the same issues with little pieces of apps being everywhere.

AppCleaner is free.

This particular installer is a .app rather than a .pkg. I don't think there's anything that would make a .app log all of its changes.

Having worked with remote teammates, I'm open to anything that makes people feel more like they're part of a common workplace.

I think I met this team once; while I was a little dubious at first, seeing how they laid out the page makes me much more interested. I like the concept and I think our team will give it a go.

I love the friendly cartoons on the website. It does make a difference!

Awesome idea. We previously had audio/video quality problems with all tools but Skype. How do you solve this problem? As I understand providing high quality video and audio is still quite a bit challenge.

Is there any only mic version? Or do you think it defeats the purpose?

Finally, a small suggestion, make question lines bold in the FAQ which will make it much easier to read.

Thanks! Video/audio quality is definitely challenging. We use a third party platform to handle our video connections, and sometimes the quality is great, but sometimes it isn't.

The QuicklyChat client doesn't work completely correctly right now if you don't have video, but I've heard a lot of feedback today asking for audio-only functionality, so we're going to look into building that in the next couple of days.

Thanks for the suggestion about the FAQ. I'll go ahead and make that change now.

Since it's built on Adobe Air (basically, Flash), I assume they're using its built-in P2P video library. I've used it before and found it to be quite good. It's what Chatroulette, or any other web based video chat app uses.

It's good to see someone work on the one touch videchat problem. No one seems to do it well.

Can more than 2 people participate in a video chat?

Not currently, although we're working on implementing that feature right now.

I do like this concept, but the interface is awful. I had various issues with contacting the server when signing up / signing in (as other users have reported). I've finally got in and am looking forward to checking out my first chat.

Sorry about the registration/login problems you and a lot of our other users have been seeing. We've been running into a few issues with logging in and our video servers that we didn't find in testing before because of the load from all the HN traffic. We're working as quickly as possible to resolve those.

QuicklyChat looks awesome - good job guys! The program runs fine on my machine too.

When am I EVER at work and "not busy"??? If that EVER happens it means I have literally run out of things to do at work, and I should go home and do something non-work that I want to do (and then I'm "busy" again). Maybe I'm sick in the head, but for me there is no such thing as "I'm available to be interrupted" time. Interrupt me, fine, and then I have to do a little mental triage, which is more important, what I'm doing now, or what you are interrupting me with? Life is too short and too precious to sit around waiting for people to chat with you. I guess what I'm saying is that there should be "online" and "offline" but I don't get it wrt the yellow neutral symbol.

PPS yes, people find me prickly

Even if you're busy any time you're at work, in most modern workplaces, engaging with your coworkers is part of the job. Over the course of your workday, there are probably some periods where interruptions are less of a setback. We'd like to see conversations happen during those times, rather than when you're untangling some tricky knot of a problem in your head.

I really like this idea, but is it possible to include an easy way to do screen sharing as well? I want to easily describe the error that I have on my screen to my co-workers.

Screen sharing is definitely in the works.

I feel like this has a lot more potential than the workplace... perhaps a mobile app where people can leave their friends short video messages?

I've been working on something that is very similar to this. http://askbox.me will be released (mobile version being worked on as we speak).

Our product AskBox and QuicklyChat are very similar in essence, but ours is not a desktop application at all- it's browser/mobile based.

cool. I will give it a shot. I use google video chat regularly. Also, if you can add a way to easily share my screen (or even screenshots), that would be amazing. I have been wanting a way to 'push' my screen to coworkers, even within the same office.

Sharing the screen is definitely in our plans for functionality we're building next.

No Linux support? Shame. That's my work OS and I really love the idea of this.

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