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Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

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Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#161

Post by mlthoughts2018 »

Swizec wrote: post #157
danShumway wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The goal is for workflows to evolve This exchange is a pretty good summation of one of the biggest purely practical reasons why I'm so obsessive about tools, and why I'm so willing to put up with the initial cost of learning systems like Linux and Vim/Emacs. Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new penc…

> Only in the software industry would someone tell me that my professional tools should change because change is inherently good Translation: "we're paying all these engineers and product managers and they need something to do"

And they are all scrambling to data mine every arbitrary slice of the data to make it look like the musical chairs of features somehow drove conversion and the lack of bottom line fiscal performance is some other department’s fault for handwavy reasons.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#162

Post by ncmncm »

bob1029 wrote: post #67
wildmusings wrote: post #24

There is this long-standing bug on mobile versions of slack where large swaths of messages just disappear. The only way to get them back is to sign out and sign back in. This is supposed to replace business email?

You know what largely replaced business email AND these crappy chat applications for us? GitHub issue threads. We do a very large part of our collaboration right next to the code now. Email & chat is now mostly to just asynchronously notify regarding one or more issue numbers. Managers, developers, everyone. If you want something discussed or handled, make an issue. It's got a single numeric identifier that's trivial…

Know what's better than Github issues? A directory in the tree named Issues. Create files there. They all stay with the project. Append comments to them. Code snippets. What have you.

git grep finds them.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#163

Post by Thaxll »

userbinator wrote: post #141
Thaxll wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Ripcord is making money on illegal thing? Discord / Slack ToS forbids third party app afaik. Edit: Why am I being downvoted? https://old.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/8tukek/ripcord_...

From the official Slack API docs site, https://api.slack.com/community we find "terminal-slack - Terminal client for Slack" "Slacker - Simple Slack client for the CLI" "scudcloud - Ubuntu client for Slack" I'm pretty sure there are others in that list which are also standalone thirdparty clients, but clearly they would not be listing those on their own site and providing plenty of API docs if they forbid them.

https://slack.com/intl/en-ca/terms-of-service/api

"(D) attempt to reverse engineer or otherwise derive source code, trade secrets, or know-how of our APIs or Services;"

I'm pretty sure the voice feature is not part of the public API.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#165

Post by ben_jones »

danShumway wrote: post #139
jakebasile wrote: post #19

Reading their non-replies on Twitter feels like I'm reading something specifically designed to piss me off. Smarmy apologies, low empathy, cocksure of how correct their vision of a chat service should be. This one in particular[1]: > The goal is for workflows to evolve, but we realize change can be a bit of a pain. "Stupid peasant, we are only here to help you. Once you see the glorious vision we have you will thank…

> The goal is for workflows to evolve This exchange is a pretty good summation of one of the biggest purely practical reasons why I'm so obsessive about tools, and why I'm so willing to put up with the initial cost of learning systems like Linux and Vim/Emacs. Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new penc…

Your comment is a punch to the gut for me, I've been developing an internal CRM for two years that embodies many of the philosophies you describe. But while it is somewhat depressing, I'm left with questions about how bad it really is.

First, is it possible to develop software without inconveniencing business users with temporary (let's assume the ultimate products are better then the linux/vim/emacs they are superseding) regressions and inconveniences? And what is the cost in terms of time to route around such pitfalls? Would we still be able to have startups at all if products required thousands of hours of QA or perfect test suites in order to launch?

Second, if we were to set a hard rule 20 years ago that all software was to avoid this phenomenon during its development, what valuable tools and services would never have been developed at all? Would we still have Twitter? Reddit? Steam? Whatsapp? I don't have to dig far into the history of any of those tools to find near revolutions by their userbases over braindead UI or adversarial practices in the name of "vision".

I don't know, these are open questions. I just think avoiding all such frustrations you mentioned is wishful thinking and at some point it is just part of the process of experimentation and iteration. Or perhaps this process is entirely different in a small corp. versus a big corp. environment.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#166

Post by gregmac »

Jestar342 wrote: post #8

It is infuriatingly terrible. A regression. So many times I've had similar woes with the code block and quote block mechanisms too. Another truly bizarre feature I noted and sent a bug report about was that when adding an image to an "Action" the _minimum_ size requirement is 512px by 512px. For an image that is never rendered larger than 64x64.

The changing behaviour of enter/shift+enter in code block drives me absolutely crazy.

Normally, shift+enter is newline, enter is send. However, inside a code block, it's the opposite. I constantly forget this and press shift+enter for a newline while in the code block and accidentally send a half-finished message.

Sad to see the new WYSIWYG editor does exactly the same thing.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#167

Post by ksml »

I want to chime in with one editor that I think nailed a markdown WYSIWYG: https://www.typora.io/

It's hard to explain the concept with just words, but I will try: While you're typing, markdown is fully exposed, but when you move the cursor away, the formatting characters disappear and you just see pretty formatted text. As soon as you move the cursor back to the formatted text, the markdown reappears so you can edit the plain markdown syntax.

I've been using this editor for two years and I think the developers were really clever in this implementation; I've never experienced any unexpected issues. Slack, on the other hand, has been driving me absolutely crazy. (Try changing an inline code block after you've created it. Easy in Typora, a nightmare in slack.)

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#168

Post by ryandrake »

ajkjk wrote: post #47

The funny thing is that I am sure most of the people who work at slack know it's terrible, but no one asks them. There is a small cohort of product managers who probably have a plausible-sounding reason to do it, and they need to do something to justify their jobs, so they alienate everybody else because no one stops them. I am, to put it lightly, familiar with this in other companies.

Isn’t this how all UI redesign projects happen?

The next step that also seems to happen more often than not: Despite user outcry, the company digs in, becomes defensive, and dismisses complaints with platitudes or snark like “you’ll get over it”. See also: Slashdot redesign, Fark redesign, Reddit redesign, Digg redesign, and so on.

Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible

#169

Post by abbadadda »

Twirrim wrote: post #154
tbabb wrote: post #111

This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor. In both cases, I get that some users can't or don't like to use a machine grammar/markup, however simple. For some people markup is bad UX. Give them a WYSIWYG; that's fine. But don't remove the markup editor if your WYSIWYG editor is anything but a perfect one-two-one replacement for markup (and I have never seen one that satisfies that). IIRC there was a time…

> IIRC there was a time when Confluence axed their markup, and inevitably a table or a template would get completely screwed, and there was nothing you could do but recreate it. TERRIBLE design. There was. I was using Confluence at the time, and it broke a lot of things. There was a wonderful filed bug at the time with a lot of angry people on it, where they promised to bring the old mechanism back as an option, and…

Atlassian Jira/Confluence SUUUUUCKS. They have given up on making anything better. I try to do as much as possible on Markdown files in a GitLab repo using Atom's Markdown preview (e.g., documentation). Gliffy diagrams are still OK.
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