451–460 of 1001 posts
This is funny because I work across the street of Slack’s office in Vancouver, Canada and two Slack engineers who I frequently chat with during our daily commute already told me they —and a handful of other employees— hate the WYSIWYG input box too, but were afraid to express their feelings because their role is irrelevant compared to the people who made the decision to ship it.
Can we start calling it the WYTIWYG (What you type isn't what you get) editor...
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The reason for Slack's success is probably because it's a "turn key solution": you register your company, invite your employees, enter your CC, and you're good to go. With a lot of these open solutions things are more complex. I think we should really focus on providing a good UX here if we want more adoption. (also, I don't know if Riot is that much better; opening https://riot.im/app/ makes Firefox use 100% CPU and…
https://modular.im gives a turnkey hosting solution for Riot/Matrix for what it’s worth. Riot should be lighter weight than Slack, but launch (particularly if you haven’t used it in ages) can be slow, plus we’re chasing a startup perf regression on firefox atm. The main reason Riot’s better is that you can use your own server, participate in an open network, and have control over the software if some feature gets pus…
I think the messaging on modular.im could be a lot better, IMO. I don't know what the relations between all the different organisations/people are here, but having all of "Matrix", "Riot", "Modular" is just confusing branding/marketing. It would be much better to have just "Matrix protocol", "Matrix self-hosted", and "Matrix hosted", for example.
Right now, it's not even immediately clear that hosted Matrix is an option from just looking at the Riot and Matrix websites.
Just my 2c from a casually interested potential Modular customer.
Slack’s old formatting syntax was Markdown-like but not exactly Markdown, just similar. In case anyone from Slack is paying attention to their technical users here, this is a great opportunity to move to CommonMark formatting for technical users and wysiwyg for non-technical users: just make this optional and switch the format syntax for the non-wysiwyg mode to CommonMark. I can understand that changing the formattin…
I made a small CLI tool I use at work specifically because their formatting is almost-but-not-quite-Markdown. Just stick to CommonMark, for god's sake. Atlassian, Slack, take a look at Github's editor experience because it's fantastic compared to yours.
This is funny because I work across the street of Slack’s office in Vancouver, Canada and two Slack engineers who I frequently chat with during our daily commute already told me they —and a handful of other employees— hate the WYSIWYG input box too, but were afraid to express their feelings because their role is irrelevant compared to the people who made the decision to ship it.
Ahhh the HIPPO strikes again.
The concept seems to originate from Netscape's CEO and the acronym exists since 2006, according HiPPO FAQ: http://bitly.com/HIPPOExplained
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Slack probably has statistics which indicate that by now their largest user group is non-techies. And i'm assuming that if you look at paying customers, the amount of non-technies is probably even larger. People who are probably not even aware of this thing called markdown. So if you need to increase revenue replacing markdown with wysiwyg will make sense to UX and product management.
Exactly - Slack has matched the formatting in WhatsApp, which pretty much everyone outside America uses. Far fewer people have even heard of Markdown. It's still really annoying though.
It's by far the most popular messaging platform in Brazil[0][1]. In other places in South and Central America it's also about as popular as in Brazil, so I suspect the majority of internet-connected people in America use it.
That said, WhatsApp is not a tool I use mostly on the computer to talk to my tech friends and co-workers, where I need efficient ways to communicate both using pre-formatted/code lines and in natural language, where things like bold, italic, quotes, etc become important tools to convey the right message.
[0] https://labs.ebanx.com/en/articles/special/whatsapp-in-brazi... [1] https://hbr.org/2016/04/the-rise-of-whatsapp-in-brazil-is-ab...
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Please don't cross into personal attack in HN comments. It breaks the site guidelines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). Note this one: Be kind. It's hard enough for people to hear criticism or fix mistakes without their head, or a colleague's head, being called for.
It's in their ultimate best interest to find a new vocation. You can't just hit undo or tab out of this one.
It's unlikely that the person in question is reading this HN thread, but there's a chance that they are, and that means we should do better.
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.
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…
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> 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…
If we embraced this philosophy none of us would be typing quickly on touch screen phones. Steve Jobs knew it beat a physical keyboard, and when pressed by people who complained about the new iPhone's touchscreen keyboard, he grinned and said "You'll get used to it." And oh boy, did they ever.
No, they didn't. They just stopped typing. Hence, bullshit UI's like Instagram.
> Steve Jobs knew it beat a physical keyboard
Yes, if by 'beat' you mean 'made it too expensive for general use'. But in general it was a huge blow to usability, productivity and general global intelligence.