HipChat releases native app for Mac
hipchat.com
hipchat.com
This mac app has been in development for ages, then been in closed beta and now finally it's available to everyone to try.
Our team just switched to the beta native app, and already found several critical bugs with the app within minutes.
Sorry guys, this is really poorly put together and the number of obvious bugs makes me think that you don't even use your own product!
Oh, and the fake roster pushes, gibberish names for guest users, and the fact that you can only join a room with your full name.
Joining a room with your full name can be an unexpected requirement but it really aligns with the way we enforce names on our service.
Just to run off a few issues we found within literally minutes of using the app:
1. Resizing window to a small size then making it large again causes the entire chat view to become very narrow.
2. Messages sent by one user, often get displayed next to another person's username (so it looks like someone else wrote the message).
3. Notification popups appears even when the app is actively being viewed.
4. If you go away from keyboard, the app sets you as idle, but when you return, the idle indicator doesn't get removed
I could go on and on...
Is it really a bad "beta", or has your preconceived notion on what a "beta" should be been radically altered by the sheer number of startups that throw the word around now?
Gmail was in "beta" for about a million years, and was incredibly stable for most of that. I think it has become the allegorical metric these days. But I remember back in the late 90's and early 2000's when making the choice to use beta software was a decision not to be taken lightly because you probably would find tons of very easily reproducible, obvious, critical bugs.
Don't forget that before "beta" was widely used as an adjective, it was a noun and it was immediately followed by the word "test".
I agree on reordering tabs though - you can re-order one tab and then it locks down.
I'm on the most recent OSX version in case this might make a difference. No bugs or crashes for me so far.
apt-get install ejabberd
I'm sure you can do all of these with ejabberd and some additional external tools, but setting all these components up goes way beyond just apt-get'ing the software.
Now, you might not need some (or all) of the additional features, so ejabberd is the perfect solution for you, but you can't jump to the conclusion that because you don't need a feature, nobody does.
I'm a quite new HipChat customer - we were using skype before, but the indexed archive is a total killer feature for me and already helped me and my coworkers a lot as it helps us to learn from conversations between other people, thus reducing the amount of stuff that has to be asked multiple times.
For me, that's totally worth the $2 per user per month.
What do you do when hipchat's severs are down? Twiddle your thumbs and wait for it to magically come back? At least if it's your server you can actively fix it instead of waiting for someone else to do it…
They can't even program a mobile app that reconnects me automatically (unless that's changed recently).
Also, nontechnical people are often not very comfortable using IRC/XMPP.
None of it impossible to replicate in-house, but I dare a non-technical person to replicate HipChat's stack.
Nowadays we use GroupMe for things that must be read in a timely manner. It'd be nice if we could use GTalk for it (this is a Google Apps GTalk account, not a public one).
If that's the case, I'm puzzled as to why it would maintain so much traction when the record of communication can be so valuable (e.g. people searching the log vs asking a question that has been answered many times... )
Most IRC clients do not log out of the box, so direct messages from other users are easily lost unless you go out of your way to make sure - the server does not do this logging for you.
The server module which actually connects to, and interacts with, the IRC server.
The client portion which connects to, and interacts with, the quassel server.
Most people just use "Quassel" as a simple desktop app in which case both modules are merged and it acts just like a normal IRC client.
However you can also install the server module on a server somewhere in which case it stays connected to the IRC server, buffering chats etc. You can then connect to it with the client part of quassel which is installed on your local desktop, which you close it all you are doing is closing the client module.
I really like that design, a good separation of concerns allows it.
I may be wrong, but I feel like the right persistent chat service can/should become a 21st century usenet/google group, where the conversation is always happening, IFFT-style hooks help you filter/act on info, and history is Gmail-simple.
I'm investigating a group-chat solution right now for an organization of several thousand non-technical members, and my intuition tells me IRC would simply not be adopted by most users.
Even Linux folks can participate with additional work (e.g. dozens of packages to install if you're running Ubuntu 64, since Adobe AIR is 32-bit only; annoying).
That said, I agree that the barrier to entry is pretty low.
Things I like that I think made us stick:
- @ messaging people
- private messaging
- 1st party desktop app
I'd enjoy it a lot more if it were true. Still no Retina support for any of their icons or images. Sure, the text finally looks right, but doesn't Cocoa handle that for you?
My company is limited to our chat products due to HIPAA compliance and we would love to use this product for company chat but host it on our own infrastructure.
[1] http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64377-xmpp-ja... [2] http://help.hipchat.com/knowledgebase/articles/64436-how-to-... (I love Adium!)
We're using Campfire right now, with the Propane mac client, and we have a dedicated room for notifications (currently exceptions from Errbit, monitoring alerts from Nagios, CI build failures on Jenkins, app deployments from our own custom tools).
It works pretty well, but we're a team working on a whole bunch of unrelated but overlapping apps, and having everything in a single room is getting to be very messy, and at times the Propane icon is bouncing almost continuously. And Propane doesn't support controlling when to notify me when there are new unread messages, so I have no way of filtering out the noise. Splitting out into multiple rooms is not a workable solution as the "spheres of interest" are not mutually exclusive.
I'm curious if anyone is using Campfire or some other tool in a similar way, or if HipChat could solve the problem (on first glance it looks fairly simplistic). Email doesn't cut it and direct IM through some bot is not really an option. A dedicated notification app/gateway seems like a better fit, but I haven't found one since Notifio folded.
What I meant was, when a team member wants to contact me personally, they put @pbiggar in front, and Hipchat will give me a notification for that, but not all the other messages.
What I'd like is to have a list of project names I am interested in, let the bots use the project names in their messages, and then have the client ping me when something interesting is mentioned.
Propane has custom mention support where you can enter a bunch of strings, but it doesn't really work.
While we could possibly write a custom bot that centralized everything and tied all the services together, that is going to be a fair amount of work for something that ought to exist already.
Notified messages make a ding sound in chat, flash the task bar, etc.
For my HipChat setup, build logs are silent (and don't disturb anyone), but a notification that a deployment failed has the "notify" flag set to gain everyone's attention.
Why is that silly? Why would messages about all 8 projects be going into the same space? Shouldn't they be separated? That's exactly how we filter out all the different messages. And Hipchat has shortcuts to switch between different rooms, and highlights rooms that have new messages. Works pretty well, from my experience.
Notifications like these are conceptually a queue of stuff that requires your attention. There is no point in separate notifications into multiple queues, they are all equally important. If project A is throwing a fit, it doesn't matter if I'm currently working on project B, it needs my attention.
I don't know Hipchat, but with Campfire and Propane, each chat is designed to be in a separate window/tab. If you bury the room behind a kind of modal selector (as seems to be the case, there's a sidebar with each room?), that's really no better. After all, if I've focused project A and project B starts blinking, I need to switch there. That's an unnecessary switch when all I want is a queue of items to read. (And no, email is way too heavy for this, and I don't want it interleaved with my regular email. We used to use email, those were bad times.)
It's not unusual for all projects to have incidents during a day, whether it be deployment information, exceptions or monitoring alerts.
The topical bit is important- a particular app's notifications get dumped into that app's room, for example. That means I only get notified if I'm in that room. Conversely, that means I don't get excessive notifications if I'm not in the room, for apps I'm not interested in.
"Spheres of interest", as you mention them, become less important as you grow the company. We've found it important to not get too sucked into every little aspect of the company- it's too broad. If someone thinks you should know something that's happening in a room you're not in, they can just ping you and you can hop in and stay up-to-date. That's been a really good solution for us.
If the HipChat guys see this, please consider it as feature for an update soon?
It seems "web 3.0" is all about making tarted up existing free software with hipster interfaces, selling it for $$$, and putting it "on the cloud" (i.e. on someone else's machines).
I know this is the way the world seems to be moving (backwards, back to the 1970s if you ask me, to mainframes and dumb terminals (chrome book anyone?)) ...
but I for one would rather see a world where local users controlled their own machines, their own data, their own encryption, and a peer-to-peer system for communicating
maybe someone can invent a standard.
TCP/IP anyone?
-grumpy old man
If we are intelligent enough to raise babies, drive cars, operate propane barbecues, SHOOT GUNS for f*ck's sake (in the USA anyway), then come on people, it's time to man up.
Besides, HipChat gives you a lot of nice features that you'd have to spend a lot of time trying to do yourself. Paying a small amount of money a month so that my whole team can chat far outweighs the pain of rolling my own solution and making sure everyone can use it.
however, I would totally consider it, if i could keep it on my phone all day and not have 10% battery by 2pm.
also, curious, does it do group video chat, ala skype?
Too bad grove.io didn't work out. That was a pretty solid service.