Shout – A web IRC client • Hacker News Board

Re: Shout – A web IRC client

#61

Post by rakoo » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:02 PM UTC

chimeracoder wrote: post #56

TeMPOraL wrote: post #53

There are a lot of comments here about how IRC lacks features of HipChat/Slack/whatever. If you want to try going the other way around , here's how to upgrade your IRC to support Jabber (including Facebook chat), Twitter and some other stuff: http://www.bitlbee.org/main.php/news.r.html

> There are a lot of comments here about how IRC lacks features of HipChat/Slack/whatever. I really don't understand this. What features does IRC lack that Hipchat has? AFAIK, the advantage of Hipchat is the branding, the packaging, and the support. The one thing I see ("image previews") is a feature of the client, not IRC itself. And many clients used to offer that, way back - the reason they turned it off was becau…

As always, the problem is not technical, it's packaging. Technically IRC can do all that Hipchat does, but Hipchat provides a simple bundle that any team can subscribe to/buy and use for all its use cases. To replicate the same thing with IRC, you'd need bouncers for everyone with full text search capability, a shared history of everything that happened on the server(s) of the network, support for filesharing for all clients, not just the desktop ones, you'd need some serious management of presence and profile information...

Never forget the "Show HN: Dropbox" and its immediate technical rebuttal [0], see where it is now.

Oh and Hipchat seems to do screen sharing, which AFAIK is not possible with IRC.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

Re: Shout – A web IRC client

#62

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:23 PM UTC

malditogeek wrote: post #31

ishbits wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are HipChat and Slack free enough to use as an open source project chat/support room?

If you host your source on GitHub, you should definitely check out Gitter. It's free for public repos and the integration is great; you get Markdown, integrations, IRC bridge, etc. Check for example the Marionette community to get a feeling of it: https://gitter.im/marionettejs/backbone.marionette . Disclaimer: I work at Gitter, feel free to ping me at https://gitter.im/malditogeek

[deleted]

Re: Shout – A web IRC client

#63

Post by acous » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:29 PM UTC

wut42 wrote: post #39

valarauca1 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Circa 1994: Even if the web client supports some of these features the protocol is just text, you can't add meta/structured data to a page. HTTP and TCP are just plane text too. Its what you do with that text that matters. Somebody just has to find a way to shoehorn it in. I'd propose using a basic system built on top of the basic AK meta-protocol for serial communication.

Yeah, sure. So let's add some headers directly in the message! … How do you update all IRC clients to your new spec ? :)

There's specs[1] for a third version of the irc protocol that seems to accommodate this.

[1] https://github.com/ircv3/ircv3-specifications/blob/master/sp...

Re: Shout – A web IRC client

#64

Post by sejje » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:40 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #47

aroman wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, we switched over to Slack from IRC/Google+ at elementary (elementaryos.org) in the early summer. It's been a massive improvement. We're starting to feel the limitations of the free tier though, so we do wish it were a lot cheaper.

Could you enumerate the particular pains you had with IRC that were eased by switching to Slack?

I can't speak for him, however as a programmer speaking to other programmers, I find Slack is pretty nice primarily for these reasons:

Pasting code snippets, preserving formatting and getting syntax highlighting. Pasting screenshots, usually of code, error logs, or graphical bugs. Inlining code with `def func_name()` or whatever, making things much more legible. Easily sending files.

Basically all code manipulation at their root.

For actual normal communication, IRC works just as well for me.

Re: Shout – A web IRC client

#65

Post by glomph » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:45 PM UTC

Not as pretty but http://kiwiirc.com/ is a more mature web irc client that you might want to check out.

Re: Shout – A web IRC client

#66

Post by Mandatum » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 9:55 PM UTC

If only WebSockets allowed for raw TCP/UDP requests in the browser - would bypass the need to connect over a third-party server..

Re: Shout – A web IRC client

#67

Post by scrollaway » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 10:00 PM UTC

higherpurpose wrote: post #58

brotoss wrote: post #42

Related question; anyone got a decent IRC desktop client for Windows? I'm using HexChat now, but loved Limechat wayyyy more on OSX. So much simpler/clean.

Use Quassel, open source and cross-platform. http://quassel-irc.org/

I second quassel. Not only is it an excellent client, it has an awesome core/client architecture.

Re: Shout – A web IRC client

#68

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 10:17 PM UTC

wlesieutre wrote: post #55

nacs wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An IRC bot in the channel could solve this problem easily (grab any image/binary link and mirror to a predefined location).

But you have to put the image online somewhere before the IRC bot can mirror it, so I don't see how that helps. Here's how I see the comparison: Hipchat: 1) Paste image Imgur + IRC: 1) New browser tab/window 2) Paste image 3) Click "Start Upload" button 4) Wait for upload + redirect to new page 5) Right click, copy image location 6) Switch back to IRC 7) Paste URL I use this somewhere from 10-100 times a day, so it a…

> Could I write an automated tool that takes my clipboard, uploads it somewhere, and replaces the clipboard with an image URL? Probably. Or I could use a chat platform that supports images.

Which is exactly that automated tool, but already written by someone else and embedded directly into your UI. It's not that those images magically go over the wire straight from your clipboard without being hosted somewhere (especially that, AFAIR, Hipchat is XMPP-friendly).

I do understand why Hipchat, et al. are getting more and more popular - I was under contract for few weeks at a place that used Hipchat as a company-wide communication tool and I admit it was super-convenient (as long as your machine had enough free RAM to run it, which wasn't always true; for a chat client, this thing is heavy). But the thing is, IRC could easily be on par with Hipchat-like solutions if someone wrote proper UI extensions to popular clients.

Of course until someone actually goes and does that, we'll be stuck with Hipchats.

Re: Shout – A web IRC client

#69

Post by lorenzhs » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 10:42 PM UTC

If you prefer something that doesn't force you to go all in, check out Glowing Bear. It's a WeeChat relay client that I've been contributing to. Basically, it connects to your existing WeeChat running on your server, meaning you can continue using that, or use both in parallel. Works great on mobile as well.

https://github.com/glowing-bear/glowing-bear

http://www.glowing-bear.org/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.glowing_be...

Why reinvent the wheel when you can let someone else do the heavy lifting? ;)

Re: Shout – A web IRC client

#70

Post by mgbmtl » Mon, Sep 08, 2014, 10:45 PM UTC

Mandatum wrote: post #66

If only WebSockets allowed for raw TCP/UDP requests in the browser - would bypass the need to connect over a third-party server..

It would be nice indeed, but one advantage of web-irc clients like this, is that you can run it on a server for people who can't access IRC directly from their location (firewalls, private networks, etc).

For example, I run a web-irc instance for the people on the Montreal mesh network (which runs mostly on private/unique-local addresses).