100% total clusterfuck. absolutely terrible.
Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
681–690 of 1001 posts
Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
#682This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor. In both cases, I get that some users can't or don't like to use a machine grammar/markup, however simple. For some people markup is bad UX. Give them a WYSIWYG; that's fine. But don't remove the markup editor if your WYSIWYG editor is anything but a perfect one-two-one replacement for markup (and I have never seen one that satisfies that). IIRC there was a time…
> This reminds me of Atlassian's god-awful WYSIWYG editor. Oh my goodness: triggered. I've barred the use of Confluence at our company specifically because of this. "But, but, we used it at blah company." "Yes, so did I at blahblah company, and it was unbelievably crappy and made me angry every time I had to edit a document: we're not using it." I DO NOT want to have to use what amounts to an extremely buggy, caprici…
Because of this we've implemented a tool called `mark` [1], which allows to write articles in markdown and render them as native Confluence pages.
If you're interested in having self-hosted service for that, just drop us an e-mail here [2].
[1]: https://github.com/kovetskiy/mark/ [2]: https://mark.reconquest.io/
Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
#683In their defence (not the defence of the WYSIWYG box itself) - they quite likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear desirability, improved value to user, improved usability, etc etc. You have to remember Slack's target persona is probably no longer the Engineer (If it ever was) - it's more likely a much less tech-savvy employee who finds WYSIWYG editors very handy to create rich text inputs. I guess…
> they quite likely have done lots of user testing that has shown clear desirability, improved value to user, improved usability I have never worked at a company that did user testing or if they did it was always done in a way or interpreted in a way to back up the designer's opinion. I don't think I've once in my entire 40 yr career seen a designer test with users, find out something was bad, and change their design…
> I have never worked at a company that did user testing or if they did it was always done in a way or interpreted in a way to back up the designer's opinion
My teammates just came back from an on-site user test, and the lead designer's own report describes how some features which he had pushed for were not working out for the users.
We have always done user tests, and we have always applied the results if they were meaningful, from balance to UI tuning to, sometimes, scraping entire features. There's plenty of companies that do this, and individual designers that really care about the user more than their own ideas.
Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
#684Earlier quoted context omitted.
It being open-source (under your control) or not does make a difference here. In an open-source thing, with this sort of productivity-harming breakage, you could worst-case just pay a random freelancer to fix it for you. You don't have that option with Slack.
That’s how you end up with critical apps which are full of known security issues because now upgrading requires reverse-engineering and migrating a bunch of one-off customizations. This approach only works if you’re committed to paying regularly to maintain your fork.
or upstream your fixes
Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
#685Rats - did this remove the sed shortcut for editing (s/old/new) as well?
Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
#686Earlier quoted context omitted.
It being open-source (under your control) or not does make a difference here. In an open-source thing, with this sort of productivity-harming breakage, you could worst-case just pay a random freelancer to fix it for you. You don't have that option with Slack.
That’s how you end up with critical apps which are full of known security issues because now upgrading requires reverse-engineering and migrating a bunch of one-off customizations. This approach only works if you’re committed to paying regularly to maintain your fork.
I did say "worst-case". And as another commenter suggested, upstream your fixes.
Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
#687Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The goal is for workflows to evolve This exchange is a pretty good summation of one of the biggest purely practical reasons why I'm so obsessive about tools, and why I'm so willing to put up with the initial cost of learning systems like Linux and Vim/Emacs. Outside of fundamentally better workflow improvements, most professional fields don't randomly change their tools. If you gave a professional artist a new penc…
If we embraced this philosophy none of us would be typing quickly on touch screen phones. Steve Jobs knew it beat a physical keyboard, and when pressed by people who complained about the new iPhone's touchscreen keyboard, he grinned and said "You'll get used to it." And oh boy, did they ever.
But to that point, how many professional transcriptionists or programmers are using a touchscreen keyboard to do professional work now? Have we all switched over to touchscreen keyboards on our laptops yet?
Your mistake here is confusing a consumer device with something designed for a professional workflow. Touch screen keyboards are, objectively, not faster to type on than a physical QWERTY keyboard. It's like arguing that because my mom got used to a using a cellphone for photography that physical lenses are obsolete.
Again, this is (in my mind) something that mostly only happens in the software industry. A professional racer drives with a manual transmission. When automatic transmissions came out, nobody argued that professional racers were holding back the auto-industry. Meanwhile in the software industry, mention that your workflow benefits from corded headphones, and suddenly you're jeopardizing the future of progress.
Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
#688Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Personally, I recommend switching to Ripcord as a Slack client. That's what I did some time ago, and I couldn't be happier.
Thank you! I didn't know about Ripcord, and so far it is great. I am amazed how fast it is. I'm also depressed that this amazes me, as it basically does what mIRC did for me over a decade ago. This is developed in QT by one person, and it looks pretty feature-complete to me. I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a n…
Keep in mind that Ripcord only needs to implement support for whatever Slack has already decided to implement. They don't need to do the whole "iterative design" process (which Slack is doing for them), which is precisely the part where C++/Qt things tend to fare poorly.
Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
#689This is not one of those "oh, that's annoying, i'll have to remember that and learn to work around it" issues. It's more like "I want to immediately stop using this software but have no choice". Its driving me crazy - Slack is all text input. Don't break text input dummy!
We are different. For me it's exactly the "oh you changed it, never mind, I'll use it a bit differently from now on" situation.
A “preview” button would have facilitated this. Or even better, let users edit in the preview input if they want or the regular editor, switching back and forth as desired.
Re: Slack’s new WYSIWYG input box is terrible
#690Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thank you! I didn't know about Ripcord, and so far it is great. I am amazed how fast it is. I'm also depressed that this amazes me, as it basically does what mIRC did for me over a decade ago. This is developed in QT by one person, and it looks pretty feature-complete to me. I really don't understand why a company the size of Slack invests all their development effort into such a subpar platform as Electron, when a n…
Keep in mind that Ripcord only needs to implement support for whatever Slack has already decided to implement. They don't need to do the whole "iterative design" process (which Slack is doing for them), which is precisely the part where C++/Qt things tend to fare poorly.
That doesn't explain why Slack seemingly can't do it. They could literally hire the Ripcord author and pay him to continue development, and sell Ripcord as Slack Lite. It would be peanuts for them, and it would vastly improve their product offering.