Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HipChat releases native app for Mac

hipchat.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 129 posts

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#81

Post by __david__ »

pbiggar wrote: post #33
dreamdu5t wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't setup an IRC or XMPP server, then I don't think you should call yourself a software engineer. If you're a scrappy startup, you sure as hell better be able to setup an IRC server. And no... it doesn't take more than an hour to spin up an EC2 instance and setup inspircd as a private server.

If you're a scrappy startup, you better not have engineers wasting time setting up servers when there are great hosted products out there.

I hear what you're saying, but, come on!

   apt-get install ejabberd
5 minutes of conf file tweaking and you're done. Seriously that's it! I did this about 8 years ago and haven't touched my setup since. There's pretty much zero maintenance to do with an XMPP server.

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#82

Post by gdix »

Hilyin wrote: post #7

Its cool and all, but I don't think I could convince my company (and probably any other) that its worth $2/user. I think maybe there should be plans that can be hosted on the company servers. Maybe a 1 time fee to license the software and then support plans or 1 time support costs?

You can't convince your company (who is paying you thousands of dollars a month in salary) to spend an extra $2 a month on something that will make you more efficient? What kind of company do you work for?

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#83

Post by holman »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #78
holman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We pipe everything into Campfire, scoped into the relevant room (last time I checked we had about 80 separate rooms). The topical bit is important- a particular app's notifications get dumped into that app's room, for example. That means I only get notified if I'm in that room. Conversely, that means I don't get excessive notifications if I'm not in the room, for apps I'm not interested in. "Spheres of interest", as…

80 rooms? Ouch. I work on about 8 projects I need notifications for while I'm at work. I can't have 8 rooms open. That's just too much.

Of those 80, I regularly only keep about five open, and of those there's only three or four that I watch closely. Opt-in to your activity.

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#84

Post by dchuk »

Already seen a major issue pop up a few times where I type in a few different messages, minimize the app, come back to it, and none of my messages are there. My team is offline right now so not sure if they're getting the messages or not but damn is that annoying so far. Seems like a big deal if the core use of the app is flakey.

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#85

Post by pilif »

__david__ wrote: post #81
pbiggar wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a scrappy startup, you better not have engineers wasting time setting up servers when there are great hosted products out there.

I hear what you're saying, but, come on! apt-get install ejabberd 5 minutes of conf file tweaking and you're done. Seriously that's it! I did this about 8 years ago and haven't touched my setup since. There's pretty much zero maintenance to do with an XMPP server.

Do you get file sharing, easy group chat, @mentions across rooms, public temporary invites to customers into internal channels, very easy github and zendesk integration and, the killer feature for me, a searchable archive over all conversations?

I'm sure you can do all of these with ejabberd and some additional external tools, but setting all these components up goes way beyond just apt-get'ing the software.

Now, you might not need some (or all) of the additional features, so ejabberd is the perfect solution for you, but you can't jump to the conclusion that because you don't need a feature, nobody does.

I'm a quite new HipChat customer - we were using skype before, but the indexed archive is a total killer feature for me and already helped me and my coworkers a lot as it helps us to learn from conversations between other people, thus reducing the amount of stuff that has to be asked multiple times.

For me, that's totally worth the $2 per user per month.

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#86

Post by powdahound »

orta wrote: post #14
guywithabike wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize that HipChat is owned by... a large company, right?

I do now. I thought Atlassian had built it in-house. My worry with these is that acquisitions change the product priorities. For example I was sceptical of the recent Crashlytics acquisition by twitter but they've already gone and improved the experience for everyone by offering enterprise features for free. Its hard to tell who's going to be absorbed and fade out in these kinda things.

We've been with Atlassian for almost a year now. I hope big initiatives like this Mac app show that we're still working hard on the core product. We've got some great stuff in the works, too.

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#87

Post by davidp »

jug6ernaut wrote: post #13

Maybe I am being naive(going to assume I am), and i admittedly have never used HipChat. But could someone explain to me what this offers over say setting up your own XMPP or IRC server and using that?

The killer feature is that nontechnical Mac and Windows users can click a link emailed from anyone on their team who is already using the app, and get seamless group chat across platforms, without calling the IT department to set up a server and/or open firewall ports, or committing someone on the team to managing anything XMPP-related. It just works.

Even Linux folks can participate with additional work (e.g. dozens of packages to install if you're running Ubuntu 64, since Adobe AIR is 32-bit only; annoying).

That said, I agree that the barrier to entry is pretty low.

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#88

Post by mmanfrin »

dreamdu5t wrote: post #24
powdahound wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cost to setting up and maintaining your own server and emulating many of the more modern HipChat features (drag+drop file sharing, archived/searchable history, mobile push notifications) is not trivial. Most companies find it far cheaper to spend money on a service than roll their own in house (see also: GitHub, UserVoice, hosted WordPress, etc). Also, nontechnical people are often not very comfortable using IRC/…

The account manager at my company takes offense to this. Sorry, but even "nontechnical" people have setup mIRC when they were 14.

Your account manager is an exception, and your argument is a false equivalency: just because you know of a non-technical person who has experience with IRC does not mean that all nontechnical people have experience with IRC. Indeed, the trend is most likely that people in non-technical roles have less experience and exposure to such tools.

Re: HipChat releases native app for Mac

#89

Post by raylu »

lazerwalker wrote: post #61
shizcakes wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - I feel like the time would have been better spent implementing Adium/Pidgin plugins first.

HipChat uses XMPP, so you can already use it with Adium/Pidgin without much trouble. The only things that are really missing by default are the syntactic sugar for @-mentioning people, HipChat's custom emoticons, and inlining of image/link previews (many of which you can fix with already-existing plugins).

And the fact that, unless you identify as "bot", you get disconnected for inactivity and reconnecting spams your logs with repeats of conversations.

Oh, and the fake roster pushes, gibberish names for guest users, and the fact that you can only join a room with your full name.

Post reply on HN