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Comment by bretthellman | Hacker News Reader

Hi bambax, I'm one of the founders here at Hall. Apologies for any frustration... Does visiting our landing page help? https://hall.com . If not, send me an email at brett @ hall-inc.com . I'd be happy to give you a live demo.

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Help me with

  The Hall web app is 6 times faster than existing enterprise solutions

That's just as confusing? Can you explain that in a couple more sentences? My CTO just raved about 'We need to give Yammer a try, someone just recommended it'.

Why wouldn't we (ignoring my own 'what the hell is a social intranet' questions)? Can you give me a pitch in three sentences?

We invested in building a Single Page Application (SPA) which means when you use Hall, click around, the page never refreshes.

This helps our customers get things done insanely fast. Imagine if Gmail was a website and not a web app, that's what other enterprise apps feel like IMO.

Also, Hall is one of the few enterprise companies that has a true SPA. We ended up building a highly customized framework on top of Backbone.js, Node, Zepto. If you're curious to learn more I'm sure our CTO would be happy to write an engineering post when he has a moment. Let me know.

I'm really not trying to be a dick here.

Why do I care about a single page application and how does that make your app 'six times faster than unnamed other solutions'?

I fail to see the connection to GMail (I thought you want to move away from the 'why not just email?')?

"A true SPA"? I failed to find out what 'SPA' means [1], I thought SLA first but got confused.

Nothing personal, but your reply didn't help a bit for this single guy here. I was complaining about marketing terms on your site and got .. a response on the same level.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPA

Developers probably aren't the intended audience. Yammer, Chatter, Hall, etc are going after enterprise customers.

developers think: "oh irc, on _the_ web"

Hi darklajid, I'm CTO of Hall. Let me know if you have any additional technical questions about the app. As Brett said, it's probably time to start doing some more technical blog postings.

Hey, I'll forward that internally (it seems we are going to introduce a solution like yours/yammers in the near future, based on the "I want this!!" face I saw today).

But yeah, more technical information would be nice. I would _guess_ (wildly, with little information..) that your standard target customer is the management type - at least that's what the website shows me right now (and 'six times faster than some unknown enterprise solutions' is really .. weird).

If you go for more technical details or really just more "Look, this is why we're doing cool stuff" posts: I'd be interested to learn more.

I'm just wondering what did you use to package your webapp for desktops?

Thanks!

stokanic, we started with adobe air which was a quick way to test our hypothesis early on that a desktop app would increase retention. We have since moved on to building native experience w xcode.

Ah, I see you've only done the desktop app for osx and not win. I was hoping you'd use something like CEF[1] and that you'd blog about it

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromiumembedded/

This is a bit off-topic, but since you posted here - the "hall" logo in header could use tighter kerning between the "a" and the first "l".

Also, I personally found the landing page pretty useful in terms of explaining the core user stories (group chat, 1v1, file sharing), so kudos from me.

Wow, thanks mmatants. I like your eye for detail re: our logo. I'd love to hear more about your feelings about the app itself. (I'm CTO of Hall btw.) Thanks for checking it out!

> Does visiting our landing page help?

Yes, thanks (although one needs to scroll to get the information); apparently Hall is a group chat solution for the enterprise? Seems nice and useful.

I had no problem with Hall BTW, but with how the article was written.

Every page on the site redirects to a login/signup page on my iPhone. I cannot read anything about the product or company.

That's a mobile redirect bug on our end. Thanks for pointing this out. Expect an update soon.

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