331–340 of 382 posts
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https://gajim.org/ tends to be best for desktop (binaries exist for most desktop OSes). For macOS, you may want to try Adium or Psi. Or you can use https://movim.eu/ which, though a web client, has fairly good feature support as well.
I second Gajim especially 1.0.0 version that looks good. There is also https://dino.im but that's still in alpha.
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There are others of course. You can go Telegram or Signal as a great cross platform chat. Not geared directly towards business, but still a great alternative. Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens. On my phone I run: Telegram, Messenger, Viber, whatsapp, hangouts, signal, slack and SMS. I should have installed skype as well, but its…
> Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens Slack is showing that the usefulness and popularity of a chat app has exactly 0% to do with whether it uses an open or closed protocol. It's all about product design and user interface.
Emoji, gifs, fuck off.
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It may be a byproduct of how Google incentivizes their engineers. As I've heard from chatting with engineers and PMs at Google, the biggest rewards go to those that take a product to its first major release and the initial marketing fanfare. After hitting 1.0 you typically see teams break up, the star engineers moving on to the next big thing. Once that happens the pace of the products development slows significantly…
Writing really good software takes years of user feedback, and a team of knowledgeable engineers digesting that feedback to write new versions. A company can afford to do that when its users are its customers. When they are its product instead, you get a steady stream of half-baked and quickly-abandoned software, often installed via forced update.
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I second Gajim especially 1.0.0 version that looks good. There is also https://dino.im but that's still in alpha.
thanks you two, will give Gajim a try!
What happened at Google? I remember when gmail was first released - such a great product. Hangouts destroyed the google talk experience and community. Someone should have gotten fired over it. Everyone seemed to use google talk before the plus/hangouts conversion. Such a massive lost opportunity. There are many other examples of half-baked and unmaintained software from G. For example, play music's web UI has many ir…
Google just can't do UI's, I can't think of a UI put out by google that I don't dislike, if not completely hate. It's almost like there's someone super senior in the company who forces bad decisions on designers. The crowning achievement of absurdity is probably the YouTube app, it's not as bad as Skype, but given time they may get there.
I switched away years ago, and am increasingly baffled whenever I accidentally run a google search.
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Didn't they change it so it's much more similar to how Chrome extensions work? Shouldn't it in fact be easier now to have an extension work in both Chrome and Firefox? The Mozilla wiki page on WebExtensions even says "Much of the specifics of the new API are similar to the Blink extension API."
The Chrome extension used should work just fine with Firefox, but Google would rather try and force vendor lock-in. At this point I just use Jitsi, it works every time without any browser extensions to do a quick video conference or screen share.
In 2015, Mozilla announced that it would drop support for NPAPI plugins in 2017, giving websites using NPAPI plugins ~18 months to switch to a non-plugin solution. When the NPAPI deadline came, Google announced the Hangouts would stop working in Firefox, they were "actively working to develop a solution" for Firefox, and until then Hangouts users should use another browser:
https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2017/02/google-hangouts...
It's 2018 and Google is still working to support WebRTC in Firefox, but they're definitely working on it. In fact, WebRTC Hangouts does mostly work in Firefox now, but only for users with a G Suites enterprise account whose admin has manually enabled Hangouts. I don't know why.
"Hangouts Meet" is a different product using WebRTC whose support for Firefox is still in development.
I've been documenting this saga on this Mozilla wiki as part of the NPAPI deprecation and Win64 Firefox rollout:
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I've migrated off Google services as much as possible over the last six months; I use Duck Duck Go for searches, and fastmail for email with my own domain. I also use the fastmail client's built in calendar. So far I've only had to fall back to a Google search a few times in six months, and the fastmail client is light years behind gmail inbox and gcal, but it's fine for my usage patterns. A year ago I was spending h…
This seems to be a common and popular trend these days, especially on HN. Is anyone doing the opposite and becoming more ingrained into the Google ecosystem? I'd love to dive more into the Android/Google side of things, but these sentiments are (unfortunately) making me think twice about doing so. I'd like to read different perspectives if they are out there.
I’ve moved further and further from google for my personal email and communications, for all the reasons elucidated above. However, for my commercial presence, I opened a gsuite account because it seamlessly brought together - and kept together - disparate components that I wanted to be able to use in a device-agnostic manner for myself and my team. I could have brought things together from a half dozen different, possibly better, services but gsuite was basically one-stop-shopping. I didn’t want to spend time getting the tools together, I wanted to spend it on the job at hand. The communications tools are good enough.
That said, I may change my mind about that. For getting work done I still find Outlook kicks the shit out of gmail, and Microsoft Live or 365 or whatever they call it has a very very solid online office suite (and their offline tools remain best in class, IMO). Todoist integrates with both. I’m just lazy about non-mission-critical upgrades. I don’t have a good replacement for google hangouts, though. Skype is a festering tire-fire, and I don’t ever want to use a webex unless I’m being held at gunpoint by the Cisco CTO.
It is remarkable how thoroughly Google has munged their communications platforms. Especially as an iPhone user, I am constantly befuddled trying to get a semblance of a well organized contact list between my google apps, never mind a correspondence between the iPhone native contact list. I have a google voice number, and generally I assume that messages get to me one way or another. The most recent baffled was finall…
It may be a byproduct of how Google incentivizes their engineers. As I've heard from chatting with engineers and PMs at Google, the biggest rewards go to those that take a product to its first major release and the initial marketing fanfare. After hitting 1.0 you typically see teams break up, the star engineers moving on to the next big thing. Once that happens the pace of the products development slows significantly…
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There are others of course. You can go Telegram or Signal as a great cross platform chat. Not geared directly towards business, but still a great alternative. Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens. On my phone I run: Telegram, Messenger, Viber, whatsapp, hangouts, signal, slack and SMS. I should have installed skype as well, but its…
> Chat apps are the posterchild of what happens when open standards (irc, jabber, xmpp,...) get replaced with walled gardens Slack is showing that the usefulness and popularity of a chat app has exactly 0% to do with whether it uses an open or closed protocol. It's all about product design and user interface.
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it was originally a company called grandcentral and eventually acquired by google. they basically left it as it for YEARS
Exactly. There's a reason users/clients have come to fear the Google acquisition of a product they've come to depend on and in which they've vested hopes of continued improvements and solutions. At least Google hasn't outright put a bullet in Voice, yet.