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Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

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Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#511

Post by always_good »

AlexandrB wrote: post #134
dennisdamenace wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it a bad idea? And I doubt _any_ business has centralized their communications with Slack. I’m sure they are still using phones, and email and face to face communication.

> I’m sure they are still using phones, and email and face to face communication. Slack's rise continues to baffle me. It's not good or widespread enough to replace email, Skype messenging, SMS or phone calls - so it's yet another thing I have to stay on top of at work. My life would honestly be easier without Slack.

Well, it replaces all those things when you want async messaging with a decent UX.

I'm not sure how serious to take you when you think Skype is better.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#512

Post by bogomipz »

ndarilek wrote: post #277
blindgeek wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So much this! I happen to be a blind software developer who has had just this sort of experience in years gone by. Web apps mean that you are at the mercy of the developers. Something can work one day and break the next. This is even more true for blind people than it is for the general public. Even if there is accessibility testing, I doubt that it covers my particular toolstack. I'm on Linux. So I'm doubly a niche…

Oh man, makes me so happy to see the accessibility concerns at the top of this thread. I hate Slack so much. Nothing has made me say "is 10 AM too early for a beer?" quite so much as that absolute pile of uselessness. I thought they'd actually improved their accessibility story when my screen reader read various elements as buttons. Later I discovered that, while they'd likely added the correct ARIA role to a , they…

>"I hate Slack so much. Nothing has made me say "is 10 AM too early for a beer?"

Thank you for this, this made me laugh. You are not alone in this reaction.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#513

Post by FooBarWidget »

aestetix wrote: post #447

It seems that there is an increasing trend from Bay Area tech companies (maybe tech in general) to bootstrap by taking in users feedback (twitter RT feature), get to a certain size, and then totally abandon their base. To an extent this makes sense, like if there is a new company CEO who has a different vision, etc. But many of these decisions-- dropping Google Reader, the trend to ditch the headphone jack, and now S…

> It seems that there is an increasing trend from Bay Area tech companies (maybe tech in general) to bootstrap by taking in users feedback (twitter RT feature), get to a certain size, and then totally abandon their base.

You should read the book "Crossing the Chasm". This strategy actually makes a lot of sense if you want to be successful. Summary: your early adopters are not your main customers, and there is a divide there. You will hit a ceiling in growth if you continue to focus on the early adopters.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#514

Post by zeveb »

Y_Y wrote: post #417
zeveb wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just use emacs-slack[0]; my entire emacs usage is currently a fraction of yours. On X, this means emacs-slack displays images, emoji &c. just like the web or pseudo-native clients do. [0] https://github.com/yuya373/emacs-slack

Oh great, now every lazy developer is going to write their app on top of emacs and distribute a crappy Emactron version that uses almost eight megs of RAM. But seriously, how hard would it be for a sneaky dev to make emacs with emacs-slack into a normal person application with clicky buttons and no ugly gnu? Could be worth a lot of money, or at least github stars.

> But seriously, how hard would it be for a sneaky dev to make emacs with emacs-slack into a normal person application with clicky buttons and no ugly gnu?

Well, out of the box emacs has a clicky-button toolbar: https://i.stack.imgur.com/ml0UE.png

And using the keybindings folks expect from Windows is part of modern emacs: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/CuaMode

As an aside, I absolutely love the idea of every new app being written atop emacs, but I'm an incorrigible emacs user. I use emacs for email, for git, for slack and (often but not always) for web browsing. Oh, and also to edit text.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#515

Post by always_good »

rplnt wrote: post #416
lttlrck wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Animated images and emoji can be disabled in the Accessibility settings. Spritesheets can be disabled under Advanced. Maybe it helps, sorry I have no before/after but my Slack is sitting at 300MB right now and I deal with an high number of very active channels.

Animated emojis can eat 100% CPU on my MacBook Pro if someone spams enough of them. It's insane how demanding and bloated the app is for what it does.

Yeah, I noticed that too. Except one animated emoji tagged on someone's message will do it for me on a new Macbook Pro.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#516

Post by always_good »

saagarjha wrote: post #272
rocky1138 wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true for greybeards, but I've found the opposite with people of the younger generations.

> I've found the opposite with people of the younger generations You're talking to one

Well, I'd have to agree with them. My peers are generally happy using Slack, Discord, and other proprietary solutions.

Though I'm not convinced that greybeards are any different, just the ones you find caring about it on the internet.

My dad's a 68-year-old old school embedded hardware developer and he'll use whatever toolkit works. I reckon most people in the world are like him and not obsessing over tools, despite what HN makes you think.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#517

Post by robin_reala »

jbob2000 wrote: post #498
bramd wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the standard really depends on which slice of the world/market you're looking at. NVDA[0] is a very capable screenreader as well and does some things even better than JAWS. It's totally free and open source. [0]: https://nvaccess.org/

That's great, but nobody uses it, so we don't target it.

For GOV.UK we came up with a screenreader breakdown of JAWS at 38.5%, VoiceOver at 21.2% and NVDA 12%. That’s not a lot, but it’s not nobody.

https://accessibility.blog.gov.uk/2016/11/01/results-of-the-...

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#518

Post by always_good »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #467
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Here's a thought: how about you write a native app for each platform? I can guarantee that the hundreds, if not thousands, of engineers working on AppKit and Windows APIs are a lot better at getting this to work than your team. You're joking, right? Have you not noticed any of the pain that anybody trying to make cross-platform app goes through, and hence the huge popularity of cross-platform frameworks?

No. It's not hard to write a cross-platform app, but it _is_ more difficult and more expensive than writing an app using a cross-platform framework or web stack. That's the tradeoff, and I wish companies would be more honest about it. But a company with as many engineers as Slack doesn't really have an excuse beyond "we want to spend less".

Also, I have a problem with the word "hard" in the context of software development.

Things are usually hard not because of some lofty technical goals, but because the sum of all the papercuts is hard. It's just developer hubris to look at the trade-offs someone makes and say (on HN of course) "meh, these other trade-offs aren't even that hard, c'mon!"

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#519

Post by mwcampbell »

spdionis wrote: post #421
flukus wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, how do blind developers feel about minimalist languages like lisp? On one hand it seems like it would read very well in some circumstances (+ 1 2), but the scoping could be a real pain. Cobol seems like another language that might be well suited to them.

"parens parens parens parens parens parens parens some code here parens parens parens"

The regularity of Lisp's syntax suggests an interesting way to render it in speech, at least for blind people who happen to have a good ear for music. Set the TTS engine to monotone (i.e. no attempt at natural intonation), and increase the pitch for each level of parenthesis nesting. So it would basically be singing the code, going up a note or two for each level of nesting. It would sound weird, but I think it could work for some people, myself included.

Re: Tell HN: Slack decides to close down IRC and XMPP gateways

#520

Post by xenator »

m-p-3 wrote: post #76

Is Mattermost a viable alternative, and is it possible to bridge it with IRC and XMPP?

I have some experience with MM as user and can say that is just an imitation of the Slack. Every pixel trying to say "we were unable to make a real copy of the Slack". Have feeling that developers still use Slack for their own communications and blind copy what they see.

Slack is not standard. There is a lot of the things that can be better in many ways.

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