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HipChat releases native app for Mac

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Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#31
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that HipChat is owned by... a large company, right?

I do now. I thought Atlassian had built it in-house. My worry with these is that acquisitions change the product priorities. For example I was sceptical of the recent Crashlytics acquisition by twitter but they've already gone and improved the experience for everyone by offering enterprise features for free. Its hard to tell who's going to be absorbed and fade out in these kinda things.

[deleted]

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#32
post #19

I know people are happy as the infamous GIF bug is fixed, but seriously this is one of the worst 'beta' apps I have tried. 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 num…

What kind of bugs have you found?

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#33
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Among other things, not having to set up your own XMPP or IRC server.

If you can't setup an IRC or XMPP server, then I don't think you should call yourself a software engineer. If you're a scrappy startup, you sure as hell better be able to setup an IRC server. And no... it doesn't take more than an hour to spin up an EC2 instance and setup inspircd as a private server.

If you're a scrappy startup, you better not have engineers wasting time setting up servers when there are great hosted products out there.

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#34
post #19

I know people are happy as the infamous GIF bug is fixed, but seriously this is one of the worst 'beta' apps I have tried. 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 num…

Philosophical question:

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".

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#35
post #7

Its cool and all, but I don't think I could convince my company (and probably any other) that its worth $2/user. I think maybe there should be plans that can be hosted on the company servers. Maybe a 1 time fee to license the software and then support plans or 1 time support costs?

Its worth $2/user not to have to set stuff up on my company servers. We're a small company though (6 people now) so maybe the economics are different where you are.

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#36
Apologies for hijacking the thread, but I'm wondering:

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.

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#37
post #19

I know people are happy as the infamous GIF bug is fixed, but seriously this is one of the worst 'beta' apps I have tried. 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 num…

Been using it for an hour or so and haven't run into any issues - what have you found? Just saying critical bugs is pretty unhelpful to everyone.

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#38
All I can surmise from this video is the that old HipChat must have really sucked. I have no idea what this product is or why I should care, because the video and webpage don't explain any of this. Maybe someone can explain what HipChat even is...??

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#39

Maybe I am being naive(going to assume I am), and i admittedly have never used HipChat. But could someone explain to me what this offers over say setting up your own XMPP or IRC server and using that?

One major difference is that it maintains persistent state - so when I log back in I see all the history and conversations from when I was logged out.

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#40

We switched from Campfire to HipChat about 6 months ago and it's been awesome - apart from the Adobe Air client crashes whenever someone posts a GIF. Hopefully this'll fix it :D

What prompted you to change, and what has been better about it?

We hired someone new, so had to upgrade from Campfire's free plan. HipChat would have been the same price, so we decided to give it a try, and never turned back.

Things I like that I think made us stick:

- @ messaging people

- private messaging

- 1st party desktop app

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