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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

But you have to put the image online somewhere before the IRC bot can mirror it, so I don't see how that helps. Here's how I see the comparison:

Hipchat:

1) Paste image

Imgur + IRC:

1) New browser tab/window

2) Paste image

3) Click "Start Upload" button

4) Wait for upload + redirect to new page

5) Right click, copy image location

6) Switch back to IRC

7) Paste URL

I use this somewhere from 10-100 times a day, so it adds up. And it doesn't interrupt the flow of whatever I'm working on, just a single action that doesn't require any thought or aiming my cursor to click on things.

Could I write an automated tool that takes my clipboard, uploads it somewhere, and replaces the clipboard with an image URL? Probably. Or I could use a chat platform that supports images.

Edit: Trimmed one step with copy image location instead of actually navigating to the image

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> Could I write an automated tool that takes my clipboard, uploads it somewhere, and replaces the clipboard with an image URL? Probably. Or I could use a chat platform that supports images.

Which is exactly that automated tool, but already written by someone else and embedded directly into your UI. It's not that those images magically go over the wire straight from your clipboard without being hosted somewhere (especially that, AFAIR, Hipchat is XMPP-friendly).

I do understand why Hipchat, et al. are getting more and more popular - I was under contract for few weeks at a place that used Hipchat as a company-wide communication tool and I admit it was super-convenient (as long as your machine had enough free RAM to run it, which wasn't always true; for a chat client, this thing is heavy). But the thing is, IRC could easily be on par with Hipchat-like solutions if someone wrote proper UI extensions to popular clients.

Of course until someone actually goes and does that, we'll be stuck with Hipchats.

> Which is exactly that automated tool, but already written by someone else and embedded directly into your UI. It's not that those images magically go over the wire straight from your clipboard without being hosted somewhere (especially that, AFAIR, Hipchat is XMPP-friendly).

Oh I'm aware that it's not actually a magical feature, it just feels that way from a user interaction perspective. They all go up on S3 and have a text link, which gets an inline picture just like other image URLs.

From what I've heard about IRC, there's not an actual well-defined spec anywhere that all of the clients follow, which I'm guessing is part of why there aren't a lot of better IRC clients being written. It's easier to come up with your own protocol where you understand how it works and know exactly how every client will behave.

I do wonder why there isn't an open source effort for fancy features on top of XMPP. Not enough interest? Most developers don't do visual work and see IRC as "good enough"? Or it does exist and I've just never heard of it?

> Hipchat:

> 1) Paste image

Then the history if filled with stupid crap and you can't find any useful stuff in it. Stupid text can be easier to jump over, images spanning the whole page can be more annoying.

There is a chat search functionality available in slack. Not sure about hipchat since I haven't used it.

There's search if I'm trying to find something, but honestly it's easier for me to locate things when scrolling through and there are images. I scroll through as fast as I want and still say "Ok, there's the screenshot I sent of the texture generation graph, the thing I'm looking for was a bit earlier.

I don't see how a giant uninterrupted wall of text going back to the beginning of time is better.

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