6 ms·
Google Hangouts
- dauoalagio 11y agoSure, it looks fine. Would love SMS integration though
- ljk 11y agoand picture messaging too
- rp1229 11y agoI'm not sure if I'm missing something, but that is a considerable amount of wasted space (Hi, rp1229! Get started by calling or messaging a friend below). I thought my messages would show up there, but nope, they just show up on the bottom similar to other Google sites.
- barosl 11y agoI've always wondered why there is no dedicated Hangouts website. I always had to choose between Gmail and Google Plus to send a message. This may have been a way to encourage the uses of their other services? Anyways, finally they made a reasonable choice. The chat window looks still elementary, though. I expected it to expand to fit the browser window. But it is still the tiny one that can be seen in Gmail and Google Plus, which is a bit annoying to use.
- joenathan 11y agoIs it just me or do the three dots on the lower left do the same thing as the hamburger menu at the top?
- linkydinkandyou 11y agoIt looks exactly the same for me, too.
- gomox 11y agoIt's just the UX guys at Google acknowledging this article from a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10036061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10036061 Namely, Joe-the-user can't see the hamburger menu at the top and looks for more tools where they are supposed to be: after the first few tools. So the UX guys at Google put an affordance there for him [0]. I've seen this quite a few times, especially for interactions where the search box is within the hamburger-driven overlay. Some sites/systems add a dummy, redundant search box on the main UI that just opens the hamburger menu and focuses on the newly-displayed search box. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
- calinet6 11y agoSure it's important that people grok that there's more stuff, but for pete's sake, pick one affordance. That just looks as clunky and indecisive as a drawer with both a knob and a handle.
- sssilver 11y agoGoogle's UX/design now reminds of MSN/Hotmail/Yahoo of 10 years ago. All the pointless image-heavy neutral visual noise. Why on earth are you showing me that waterfall background? I don't want your watered down elevator music. Google needs to remember why Gmail, Reader, etc ended up destroying the aforementioned products in terms of UX, and change the direction it's headed at.
- rsuelzer 11y agoGmail has by far the work UX out of any of the popular applications I use. It's an eye sore.
- gomox 11y agoI don't think GMail is pretty, but it's very functional. Good UX != visual beauty. As a result of a fairly recent job change, I have been forced into desktop IMAP clients again. I have to admit I have discovered a whole new level of appreciation for GMail. Just the fact that it actually runs filters server-side and it has a (conceptually speaking) equivalent application for mobile devices trumps everything else. You can actually get it do to what you want. The company I work for has a very heterogeneous systems landscape and I can say without much hesitation that GMail + Gcal's only serious alternative is Outlook. Everything else seems to me like a digital version of pen and paper.
- pyre 11y agoI think that IMAP-serverside filtering is possible: https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter https://github.com/lefcha/imapfilter I haven't really looked into exactly what it's doing though (and I'm no expert on the IMAP spec).
- gomox 11y agoSeems like that is just a command-line version of an e-mail client filter: it connects to the server, runs a query, and moves stuff to folders. Based on my experience with the average IMAP server search performance, I wouldn't let my users use this if I was in control of the server.
- xfr 11y agoSweet, now I don't have to keep Chrome around for Hangouts on OS X.
- deanstag 11y agoi dont see an option for OSX hangouts. Where did you get it?
- scott_karana 11y agoAre you being sarcastic? This is the same, rudimentary "interface" that has always worked in all the browsers. :/
- xfr 11y agoI used to use the Hangouts Chrome app but I will be using this now instead.
- scott_karana 11y agoYou know that this interface was available in GMail and G+ since Hangouts first launched, minus the "pretty background", right?
- linkydinkandyou 11y agoOk, I'm game! Join me: https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/_/g7qn5tqae6r63h7curf5wujyiua https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/_/g7qn5tqae6r63h7curf... I've always wondered why it was so friggin' hard to start a hangout.
- TD-Linux 11y agoIt still requires a proprietary NPAPI plugin on Firefox, sadly.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- AustinG08 11y agoJust wanted to chime in that I strongly dislike the new facelift to hangouts for Android. Loading images in the chat cause it to stutter pretty hard on my Nexus 5.
- joshstrange 11y agoWow.... I got excited for finally a single place to go for hangouts (I was always confused at the best "launch point") and a better interface (chat on gmail hasn't changed in what feels like a decade) and lo and behold... It's a pretty launch interface but the SAME CRAPPY CHAT WINDOWS... I've always felt like hangouts was a horribly mismanaged product (starting and joining a hangout has always been a longer and more difficult process than it should) and this just confirms it. There is SO MUCH potential and they've thrown it all away and not even for some gain. It'd be one thing if the interface sucked because of ads or something like that but no, it just sucks to suck. I continually have high hopes for hangouts and google does their best to dash them every time (Oh look they finally 'got it'... Nevermind, they fell flat on their faces again).
- jefftchan 11y agoTotally agree. See Facebook's messenger.com for a similar thing, done much better.
- mintplant 11y agoWhat exactly is wrong with the Hangouts UI? Admittedly I've only used it a few times, but it's always seemed leagues ahead of the unusable mess that Skype has become.
- gomox 11y agoThe complaint is not usually about the in-videoconference UI, but about the general product and overall confusing portfolio of applications that exist under the Hangouts moniker. There's the Android app which replaced GTalk, which also does (or used to do?) SMS, this new thing, the Google+ builtin UI, and a few others (what's the successor to the GTalk Windows app?). I have been in Hangouts-on-air sessions were I had to intervene to send a proper link to a guest because the hosts could not figure it out. Your question right here appears to be evidence of that: I don't even know which UI I should criticize for you as I'm not sure we are even talking about the same product. In-videoconference, I think they are on-par or slightly ahead of Skype after the latter's update (it used to be much worse). Some things are better (warns you that you are muted if it hears you speaking while muted) and some are worse (in-videoconference text messages exist in a weird limbo that only lasts the duration of the Hangout, and have no history tracking). In my opinion, it's the general "contact list"/"IM product" UI that is a bigger mess. My Hangouts app on Android keeps getting "unread" Hangout sessions from videoconference sessions I did on my computer. I sometimes get Hangout invites on my phone, sometimes on G+ and sometimes over e-mail (?). I think this aspect is what the OP was talking about when speaking about the lost opportunity. The general experience for a Hangouts-the-IM-product user is still very confusing.
- sheepdestroyer 11y agostill no way to sort online, away and offline contacts like the old tried and proved chat interface. Pass
- lechevalierd3on 11y agoIt does not compete well with messenger.com
- jesalg 11y agoOn a side note, I don't get why Hangouts Dialer has to be a separate app from Hangouts in Android
- fluidcruft 11y agoSo that carriers can blacklist it.
- zhuxuefeng1994 11y agoThe UI design is terrible. There are two sets of buttons to perform exactly same action.
- gomox 11y agoThat's not necessarily bad. It just means someone thought that it was more important for the interface to be easy to discover than it was to keep it clean. In my opinion a good IM system needs to be both easy (as it targets a mainstream audience that needs to voluntarily adopt it, a trouble that MS's offerings never had) and powerful (as it quickly becomes a big part of your day to day). Not the easiest tradeoff to design to. The clear upper hand granted to the former in this product release is pretty telling of Google's conundrum: they need to gain adoption over everything else.
- jtchang 11y agoDoes anyone else have video hangouts cause Mac OS X to completely go jet turbine 100% cpu usage?
- geofft 11y agoThis might actually be slower than my current solution for hangouts, which is to open an empty circle in Google+. (If I open the Google+ home page, I see lots of social feed activity that a) I don't care about and b) takes a while to load.) I'm often behind a slow public-wifi network and restricted on battery, so the amount of bandwidth and CPU used just to get me to text chat is actively a problem. I miss the XMPP days.
- AceJohnny2 11y ago> I mean the XMPP days. oh XMPP, you mean the protocol that required a TCP connection, and thus battery-draining maintaining a persistent connection ? I was an XMPP enthusiast. Sadly, it never made the jump to mobile properly. I wish they had amended the standard to to add a session manager that would work well with mobile. Instead, last I check, everyone implemented their own hack. Google first, with Android GTalk. They used ProtoBufs [1] Hey, did you know WhatsApp was based on XMPP? Yeah, good luck using that with an open client: their terms of service allows them to kick you off for using an unofficial client. [1] I've come to think ProtoBufs would make a perfectly good transport for a hypothetical XMPP2. It's better packed, can be better framed, and as far as I've glanced allows the same extensibility as XML gave XMPP.
- geofft 11y ago> oh XMPP, you mean the protocol that required a TCP connection, and thus battery-draining maintaining a persistent connection ? I ran my XMPP client on a UNIX server, to which I connect using mosh. As it happens, I tend to have this mosh connection open all the time to do actual work, so there's no additional overhead from running an XMPP client remotely. (Still, there's no particular reason that a persistent though quiet TCP connection needs to drain battery any more than any approach; a TCP connection can stay open indefinitely without traffic if nothing in between the applications decides to time it out. There might be complications on actual mobile platforms like phones, if your platform's push notification system does abstraction-crossing magic with the cell networks, such that you can shut down your data connection entirely until it needs to be woken up. But my use case is a laptop, so a constant IP connection is assumed.)
- kethinov 11y agoTwo things: 1. Bundle this into an NW.js app and we've finally got a Hangouts desktop app at long last! 2. Those tiny chat windows are a usability disaster. Come on. Take a cue from messenger.com!
- intsunny 11y agoWith gchat I can see who is on an android device, and who is idle (even both). Can't with hangouts, why is that? Why give end users even less information?
- bgentry 11y agoNicer interface, but have they done anything about power consumption? Would like to be able to run a 30 minute hangout without completely draining the battery on my Macbook Pro.
- gomox 11y agoI gave you an issue-tracker-spirited upvote for this. Pretty much the only reason I still put up with Skype.
- sbuttgereit 11y agoOn Windows 10, still fails to respect both Hangout's own sound settings for speaker/mic as well as the Windows configured default communication device. So while I like this interface better, any number of other services I use (e.g. Zoom, Skype) just work better with my devices. Those other services can switch to using my bluetooth headset on calls and similar. Google really is a technology company, not a products company. They have some really very clever ideas and implement them with great mediocrity more often than they should. And even when they get something solid, you can never really tell for how long the product will last or if they'll start screwing with it. For me, the only things that really come to mind as solid are maps and search. Google Now, great... if you don't have a Google Apps account. Inbox, great... if you don't need a bit slightly sophisticated formatting or image support. etc.
- mmmpie 11y agoAre you using chrome? I ran into the same issue (wouldn't respect audio settings) plus it burned 100% cup on all four cores and the audio kept breaking up. It turns out that IE 10 is good for something! Not only do the hangout plugin audio settings work but the sound itself works (no more disrupted streams) and cpu hangs out around 50% across 4 cores. Much better!
- sbuttgereit 11y agoYep. Using Chrome. I don't see the high CPU or the audio issues aside from respecting the settings though. Maybe I should give the other browsers a try! Thx!
- rekoros 11y agoHa. We just added the Hangouts interop gateway to Sameroom (https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hangouts/ https://sameroom.io/blog/announcing-support-for-google-hango...)
- niuzeta 11y agoI'm confused. Shouldn't the large space on right be where the IM window was supposed to pop in? Is it just a launch interface for already-available hangout app?
- thekevan 11y agoI have the browser extension Disconnect enabled, and it stops that page from functioning.
- taf2 11y agoAnyone else getting a 500 error? All I see when I visit is 500. That’s an error. There was an error. Please try again later. That’s all we know.
- saurik 11y agoThat is also all that I am getting.
- lists 11y agoIs that the Gmail UI re-themed?
- bfrog 11y agoAm I the only one that longs for what used to be the awesomeness that is gchat? Gchat with what hangouts has for calls/voice/video would've basically been the win. Instead it constantly feels like this buggy/gimped browser app that maybe/maybe doesn't work.
- fwn 11y agoIt is perfect. The most annoying problem with Hangouts is that I have to load the whole Gmail tab for answering a single message on my laptop. This tool is a lot faster. I zoomed to 125%, adblocked the bing background image & the now cropped giant greeting.