Only screen sharing and a dark theme are missing. Then it has everything I want as a developer.
Slack Calls: Now with video
41–50 of 127 posts
Re: Slack Calls: Now with video
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
IRC, minus a bunch of technical nonsense nobody who is busy will bother to understand or manage (mode flags, server vs network channels, out-of-band post-hoc client-to-client features, netsplits), with good stories for multi-device (single, consistent cross platform experience) and offline (messages are queued/marked as read server side, in a way consistent across devices) and bots (anyone can add an integration in a…
It sounds like you've extensively tried to work with both, correct?
Indeed. I'm the seemingly rare creature who was able and willing to jump through all the IRC hoops but can still understand the people who maybe can't but certainly won't.
Re: Slack Calls: Now with video
#43Slack calls have been broken in linux for a while--even though they worked when calling first launched. Is a fix for that on the horizon?
If you're using RHEL, you've got a version of GLIBC that's too old, we're trying to figure out what to do about this without asking users to install a bunch of crazy stuff
Re: Slack Calls: Now with video
#44Re: Slack Calls: Now with video
#45Has anyone else noticed how pristine the audio quality of a Slack call sounds? I wonder how they optimized it. My company's voip, and Lync, and Skype all fail to deliver the same kind of call quality. I've only noticed / admired better call quality when making a call within Cisco to another employee. I don't use video much but I hope they've done as good of a job as they did with audio.
No to mention the pristine UX of the "call failed" screens. Ugh. I love Slack, don't get me wrong, but the calls fail to connect about 50% of the time for me when I'm connected to my work VPN. Work VPN seems fast for everything else, just Slack calls crap out while using it... I don't have the same problems with Skype or Google Hangouts -- opened tickets with Slack and was told, "Don't use a VPN with our service..."…
Hah, I thought it was only me. I can never connect to slack call if I'm connected via VPN. I have to drop the VPN connection first.
Re: Slack Calls: Now with video
#46Does Slack have a phone bridge for voice calls? Would be helpful for participants who can't use Slack.
If not, I wonder if their APIs allow a bot to join a voice call and get access to the audio...
Re: Slack Calls: Now with video
#47Has anyone else noticed how pristine the audio quality of a Slack call sounds? I wonder how they optimized it. My company's voip, and Lync, and Skype all fail to deliver the same kind of call quality. I've only noticed / admired better call quality when making a call within Cisco to another employee. I don't use video much but I hope they've done as good of a job as they did with audio.
Slack's audio quality is on par with GoToMeeting, I think.
Of all the different solutions I've visited (Google Hangouts, Skype, Slack, Zoom, Join.me etc.), G2M has been the most reliable and best-sounding one that I've found. It's got things like native Mac app, screen sharing (just one presenter, unfortunately), audio/video recording, telephone dial-in, calendar scheduling, and persistence (i.e. you can reuse the same meeting every day). It uses little bandwidth and behaves really well on a low-bandwidth connection. And unlike GH, we've never experienced any issues connecting or staying connected.
The only thing I miss is the ability for it to pipe back a little bit of my own audio, the way I believe phones do, so that you can talk while wearing earbuds or a closed headset. (Without this, you won't hear your own voice, which I find too unnerving.)
Re: Slack Calls: Now with video
#48I hope screen sharing comes soon. They bought Screen Hero a while back, and said they were integrating it.
Yeah, right?! I had the exact same thought when I saw this. Okay, video... that's cool. But, we've been waiting for the ScreenHero purchase to turn into Slack screen sharing for ages.
Re: Slack Calls: Now with video
#49bad enough that I can be reached after work via slack and get calls while I'm on a commute (which is never compensated for aside from general salary), it'll have video? also, this only works in Chrome and on mobile, which is really messed up considering that Firefox is also a bleeding edge browser.
Just set your Do Not Disturb hours... you won't get the calls.
But I agree... more apps need to factor in if you are moving or not before placing calls or messages. I wish there was a way to say, "I only want music and maps when I drive..." on my phone and have it kill the connection and updates for everything else.
Re: Slack Calls: Now with video
#50Does slack feel like IRC to anybody else? Sorry I didn't mean for this to be divisive or rude. I wasn't aware this was a common observation. I'm not trying to be negative or incriminate the product. I use and enjoy slack every day.
I personally think that Slack has been heavily inspired by IRC and it can be seen by its feature set and failure modes – where it more resembles IRC than any other messaging solution I am aware of that came after it (importantly, Slack engineers did apparently not learn from XMPP).
One example deficiency is message ordering. In Slack, messages ordering sometimes changes sometimes after I have received two messages, that are then ordered differently. Is this an example of “eventual consistency” in the wild?
Another deficiency of Slack that definitely is more “inspired” by IRC than anything else is the reconnection handling. If you ever have used IRC, Slack and XMPP on a train (or any other spotty connection), you may have noticed that IRC (or Slack) can time out without you noticing immediately, while with XMPP temporary network problems are usually handled automatically by modern clients.
The difference in both cases lies in stream management – if each message has a sequence number (as it has in XMPP with XEP-0198), endpoints can definitely establish a) an ordering and b) what the last message received was. This eliminates any manual replay. Slack does not do this, apparently, even though unexpected network termination happens frequently.
A third defiency of Slack that makes it look like IRC is the notable absense of metadata fields. While in XMPP you can have a vCard, the Slack documentation contains this gem, indicating Slack developers themselves abuse the last name field to convey information such as not being in the office:
> We ask that everyone displays first and last names in Slack, so we can use the last name field to alert coworkers when they are out of the office, on extended leave, or sick for the day.
Source: https://slackhq.com/slack-101-onboarding-247454704155#11aa