7 ms·

Peach’s Most Interesting Feature, the Hybrid Command Line

82 points by ascertain 11y ago

minimaxir 11y ago
Are there any demos/screenshots of the Hybrid Command Line?
- lolptdr 11y ago
  https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/peach-a-space-for-friends/id1067891186?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/peach-a-space-for-friends/id... A few images from the App Store. Not very good examples for the CLI-veteran.
_kst_ 11y ago
The home page is http://peach.cool/ http://peach.cool/ It looks like the app is available only for iOS. It's a pity that the article doesn't mention either of those things.
- Maxious 11y ago
  Having tested it, it seems you can only find friends with a US phone number... or that whole feature just doesn't work.
  - dabeeeenster 11y ago
    Yeah my uk number doesn't work which is sort of amazing given plivo/twilio etc exist...
  - ihuman 11y ago
    You can add friends if you know their username
  - Ocerge 11y ago
    Yeah...it's kind of a bummer. Would be nice to see if any of the people I follow on Twitter are on Peach as well.
w1ntermute 11y ago
Death of Peach: An eerie echo of Meerkat’s collapse[0] > A messaging app called Peach triggered a media maelstrom on Friday afternoon, peaked at No. 85 on the U.S. iPhone downloads chart on Saturday, and started declining on Sunday, slipping to No. 129 by Sunday at 1:00 p.m. The tepid peak performance and an early decline are vastly significant considering the heavy tech media coverage surrounding the app. > Because modern tech media is a headless beast, you will no doubt be exposed to dozens of stories about how “hot” Peach is in coming days and weeks. Many tech reporters believe that if other tech reporters claim something is hot, it must be — regardless of whether there is any consumer interest. > By now, it’s clear that Peach is a turkey, much as it was obvious that Meerkat was dead a month after its late February 2015 launch. 0: http://bgr.com/2016/01/11/peach-messaging-app-iphone-collapse/ http://bgr.com/2016/01/11/peach-messaging-app-iphone-collaps...
- minimaxir 11y ago
  BGR linkbait aside, the amount of positive attention Peach has been receiving is suspicious, even for a startup from a founder of a successful startup. Meerkat is a surprisingly good comparison.
  - w1ntermute 11y ago
    Consumer tech is stuffed to the gills with astroturfing. It's best to take anything written by tech bloggers with numerous grains of salt.
- pbreit 11y ago
  If you're gonna read stuff like that, understand that it probably makes you dumber. At least, posting it makes you look dumber. Calling something a "turkey" after a day is as dumb as calling it an "x killer". Things like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, etc take years to become successful.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - 11y ago
zitterbewegung 11y ago
I don't get how you can take its claim that a "hybrid command line" is becoming popular. For one it only seemed like a different kind of user were introduced to computers without being exposed to command lines.
jobu 11y ago
Am I missing something? This looks like they bundled a subset of Slack's features and called it a social network. Typing "GIF," for instance, lets users search for the appropriate media to post Seems a lot like /giphy
- pbreit 11y ago
  You're missing the whole thing. For starters, Slack is for work and Peach is for personal. But I think before you dismiss something as "isn't it just x plus y?" you need to take a little bit more time and thinking to try and figure out what the product designers are trying to achieve and how.
  - thwarted 11y ago
    Maybe the product designers and product providers should be more explicit about how their product should be used and who their target demographic is, if they want a successful product, rather than making everyone "figure out" what they are trying to achieve and how.
    - pbreit 11y ago
      "Figuring it out" might be the point. You do realize that you are referring to some of the very few people who have actually already built an amazingly successful product.
    - tyre 11y ago
      I would like to put this on a t-shirt and send it to every startup. You cannot build an incredible product without a profound and nuanced understanding of your market.
  - jobu 11y ago
    That's rather arbitrary. Lots of people use Slack for both work and personal. The deeper I look and more I think about Peach, the more it looks like a messaging app that lost it's vision. I feel the same way about Snapchat lately too, but somehow they still have a multi-billion dollar valuation, so I'm obviously not the best one to rate a company/app like Peach.
lesdeuxmagots 11y ago
This feels incredibly Silicon Valley centric. Hybrid Command Line only serves to increase friction in the messaging process, particularly for normal users. Press reviews have already noted that there is a learning curve, that the experience is better with a smaller friends list. This sounds like it is set up to fail to get broader adoption.
- ksar 11y ago
  Agreed. The Slack-esque hybrid command line is a bit of a bait and switch to get the tech community interested. The average user by no means is going to memorize more than 1-2 commands, if any at all. I barely use anything other than Giphy on Slack. At the end of the day content and network effects will determine whether it survives.
  - kovacs 11y ago
    ^^ this. The commands are great but why not bring up a dialog of the commands represented by an icon that you tap to use the given command? Much better discoverability than having to type "help" and get popped out to a web page with the list.
munificent 11y ago
The idea that command-line applications could have some sort of Renaissance on devices which do not have a keyboard seems completely insane to me.
- marvy 11y ago
  I agree, but: consider that menus cost screen space, which is also at a premium. (But wait, a keyboard takes half the screen. I give up.)
- rcthompson 11y ago
  There's no fundamental reason that command line applications can't work with input from voice recognition.
  - noobermin 11y ago
    On a old slashdot flame thread on GUI vs. CLI back in the day, I pointed out that calling CLIs less familiar and less intuitive when compared to GUIs wasn't fair because CLI's do have a very familiar, non-virtual analog: speech. CLI, of course, it just a very specific and rigid language, just like programming languages.
    - tudorw 11y ago
      I've worked with many first time users over 20 years and have never witnessed any of them intuitively understand either CLI or GUI, both are artificial, contrived and unique and need to be learnt. I don't essentially see one as a better choice than the other for a new user, maybe in some ways the CLI has less abstractions which can be a help, I've witnessed much confusion over the many many ways you can enact the same result using different methods in a GUI.
      - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
        "The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned." (Discussion on who coined this phrase at http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/misc/nipple.html http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/misc/nipple.html)
ahmedfromtunis 11y ago
An entire article about an application without a single screenshot of said application. Ok.
- djsumdog 11y ago
  But they had a picture of a peach! I really fucking hate this trend of requiring that an image be next to the opening paragraph of an article. It's fucking asinine.
0xCMP 11y ago
To me, this app is perfect. Here is why: Social to me today is very scary and over commercialized. It feels like more people are trying to convince everyone else to buy something or watch them eventually parade products in their posts than being social. Great for them, but I'm not really using social media for that. I post my life, but posting my life has serious implications if made public. "Oh hey I'm traveling" could get my home broken in to. OR I say something as a joke, but just like with texting, gets misread and now I'm an asshole to people who don't know me. Worse, all this can happen years after with little to no warning. The chilling effect on sharing and keeping up with your friends who are hard to keep up with, the supposed point of social media, is enormous. I like it. I love the magic words, I think they're cute and everyone thinks that is the killer feature of the app, but I don't think it is. I think the killer features are: * The snapchat like single-button camera and easy photo sharing (personally, the only reason I use snapchat is the camera and save the photos) * The individual snapchat-story-like feeds you post to (also nice, love they go away) * The lack of a central feed or RTs or easy way to get viral that can happen in places like twitter. Obviously, I'm not going to be sharing ssh private keys or passwords over it, but for the most part it's secure against the casual online lurker. It's a great mix of the point of snapchat with the power of slack and twitter. I can come up with so many more ways I love the idea, but I can tell I'm already not doing it justice so I'll stop, but I think this is something worth looking at if nothing else as a launching point for someone else. I'm not saying it'll be the next snapchat/facebook/instagram/twitter, and I'm comfortable knowing its more gonna be like Ello and Merkat, but I like the possibilities with it for doing what I always imagined social media could and should be after seeing the exodus of quality content from friends being replaced with fake updates and perfectly posed photos. Anything that inspires spontaneity like this, snapchat, or beme is in my opinion what social media needs to deliver for me to use it and feel comfortable sharing.
bgraves 11y ago
I've been using peach for a few days (@bgraves, add me!) I'm liking it. 1. It's different and disconnected. I have FB/IG for personal/family stuff, LinkedIN/Twitter for biz stuff. Peach is more fun and more 'creative'. 2. The magic words are a gimmick for sure. But it's a _fun_ gimmick. 3. Kinda related to #1 it's a smaller 'community' now and folks are just trying stuff out. Overall I've found my self posting a quick update on Peach over the past 48 hours more than I have on "traditional" social media (can we call Twitter, et al. traditional now?) over the past 2 weeks. Yes, there's a novelty factor. And maybe that's it and it will die on the Vine.
kordless 11y ago
Would be cool to do a Slack command for this that would post stuff to Twitter/other social media sites.
xedarius 11y ago
Peach is pretty neat all in, seems like they've made social 'fun', something that's been lost by the current crop of social media companies. With regards to the command line, it's really clever, it frees up so much UI space, the app appears uncluttered and inviting. If anyone has been near a Bloomberg terminal you'll know this is how Bloomberh has worked for many years, and the users love it.
tmaly 11y ago
I would like to see a geo location based network like in William Gibson's Spook Country
jtn_001 11y ago
It's Yo messaging app but we can do more things using magic words. "magic words" have endless possibilities, Interesting to see in future that, peach keep inventing new magic words their own or allow to other third party for creating own magic words?

82 points by ascertain 11y ago

minimaxir 11y ago

Are there any demos/screenshots of the Hybrid Command Line?

lolptdr 11y ago
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/peach-a-space-for-friends/id1067891186?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/peach-a-space-for-friends/id... A few images from the App Store. Not very good examples for the CLI-veteran.

_kst_ 11y ago

The home page is http://peach.cool/ http://peach.cool/ It looks like the app is available only for iOS. It's a pity that the article doesn't mention either of those things.

Maxious 11y ago
Having tested it, it seems you can only find friends with a US phone number... or that whole feature just doesn't work.
- dabeeeenster 11y ago
  Yeah my uk number doesn't work which is sort of amazing given plivo/twilio etc exist...
- ihuman 11y ago
  You can add friends if you know their username
- Ocerge 11y ago
  Yeah...it's kind of a bummer. Would be nice to see if any of the people I follow on Twitter are on Peach as well.

w1ntermute 11y ago

Death of Peach: An eerie echo of Meerkat’s collapse[0] > A messaging app called Peach triggered a media maelstrom on Friday afternoon, peaked at No. 85 on the U.S. iPhone downloads chart on Saturday, and started declining on Sunday, slipping to No. 129 by Sunday at 1:00 p.m. The tepid peak performance and an early decline are vastly significant considering the heavy tech media coverage surrounding the app. > Because modern tech media is a headless beast, you will no doubt be exposed to dozens of stories about how “hot” Peach is in coming days and weeks. Many tech reporters believe that if other tech reporters claim something is hot, it must be — regardless of whether there is any consumer interest. > By now, it’s clear that Peach is a turkey, much as it was obvious that Meerkat was dead a month after its late February 2015 launch. 0: http://bgr.com/2016/01/11/peach-messaging-app-iphone-collapse/ http://bgr.com/2016/01/11/peach-messaging-app-iphone-collaps...

minimaxir 11y ago
BGR linkbait aside, the amount of positive attention Peach has been receiving is suspicious, even for a startup from a founder of a successful startup. Meerkat is a surprisingly good comparison.
- w1ntermute 11y ago
  Consumer tech is stuffed to the gills with astroturfing. It's best to take anything written by tech bloggers with numerous grains of salt.
pbreit 11y ago
If you're gonna read stuff like that, understand that it probably makes you dumber. At least, posting it makes you look dumber. Calling something a "turkey" after a day is as dumb as calling it an "x killer". Things like WhatsApp, Facebook, Instagram, etc take years to become successful.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- 11y ago

zitterbewegung 11y ago

I don't get how you can take its claim that a "hybrid command line" is becoming popular. For one it only seemed like a different kind of user were introduced to computers without being exposed to command lines.

jobu 11y ago

Am I missing something? This looks like they bundled a subset of Slack's features and called it a social network. Typing "GIF," for instance, lets users search for the appropriate media to post Seems a lot like /giphy

pbreit 11y ago
You're missing the whole thing. For starters, Slack is for work and Peach is for personal. But I think before you dismiss something as "isn't it just x plus y?" you need to take a little bit more time and thinking to try and figure out what the product designers are trying to achieve and how.
- thwarted 11y ago
  Maybe the product designers and product providers should be more explicit about how their product should be used and who their target demographic is, if they want a successful product, rather than making everyone "figure out" what they are trying to achieve and how.
  - pbreit 11y ago
    "Figuring it out" might be the point. You do realize that you are referring to some of the very few people who have actually already built an amazingly successful product.
  - tyre 11y ago
    I would like to put this on a t-shirt and send it to every startup. You cannot build an incredible product without a profound and nuanced understanding of your market.
- jobu 11y ago
  That's rather arbitrary. Lots of people use Slack for both work and personal. The deeper I look and more I think about Peach, the more it looks like a messaging app that lost it's vision. I feel the same way about Snapchat lately too, but somehow they still have a multi-billion dollar valuation, so I'm obviously not the best one to rate a company/app like Peach.

lesdeuxmagots 11y ago

This feels incredibly Silicon Valley centric. Hybrid Command Line only serves to increase friction in the messaging process, particularly for normal users. Press reviews have already noted that there is a learning curve, that the experience is better with a smaller friends list. This sounds like it is set up to fail to get broader adoption.

ksar 11y ago
Agreed. The Slack-esque hybrid command line is a bit of a bait and switch to get the tech community interested. The average user by no means is going to memorize more than 1-2 commands, if any at all. I barely use anything other than Giphy on Slack. At the end of the day content and network effects will determine whether it survives.
- kovacs 11y ago
  ^^ this. The commands are great but why not bring up a dialog of the commands represented by an icon that you tap to use the given command? Much better discoverability than having to type "help" and get popped out to a web page with the list.

munificent 11y ago

The idea that command-line applications could have some sort of Renaissance on devices which do not have a keyboard seems completely insane to me.

marvy 11y ago
I agree, but: consider that menus cost screen space, which is also at a premium. (But wait, a keyboard takes half the screen. I give up.)
rcthompson 11y ago
There's no fundamental reason that command line applications can't work with input from voice recognition.
- noobermin 11y ago
  On a old slashdot flame thread on GUI vs. CLI back in the day, I pointed out that calling CLIs less familiar and less intuitive when compared to GUIs wasn't fair because CLI's do have a very familiar, non-virtual analog: speech. CLI, of course, it just a very specific and rigid language, just like programming languages.
  - tudorw 11y ago
    I've worked with many first time users over 20 years and have never witnessed any of them intuitively understand either CLI or GUI, both are artificial, contrived and unique and need to be learnt. I don't essentially see one as a better choice than the other for a new user, maybe in some ways the CLI has less abstractions which can be a help, I've witnessed much confusion over the many many ways you can enact the same result using different methods in a GUI.
    - semi-extrinsic 11y ago
      "The only intuitive interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned." (Discussion on who coined this phrase at http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/misc/nipple.html http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/misc/nipple.html)

ahmedfromtunis 11y ago

An entire article about an application without a single screenshot of said application. Ok.

djsumdog 11y ago
But they had a picture of a peach! I really fucking hate this trend of requiring that an image be next to the opening paragraph of an article. It's fucking asinine.

0xCMP 11y ago

To me, this app is perfect. Here is why: Social to me today is very scary and over commercialized. It feels like more people are trying to convince everyone else to buy something or watch them eventually parade products in their posts than being social. Great for them, but I'm not really using social media for that. I post my life, but posting my life has serious implications if made public. "Oh hey I'm traveling" could get my home broken in to. OR I say something as a joke, but just like with texting, gets misread and now I'm an asshole to people who don't know me. Worse, all this can happen years after with little to no warning. The chilling effect on sharing and keeping up with your friends who are hard to keep up with, the supposed point of social media, is enormous. I like it. I love the magic words, I think they're cute and everyone thinks that is the killer feature of the app, but I don't think it is. I think the killer features are: * The snapchat like single-button camera and easy photo sharing (personally, the only reason I use snapchat is the camera and save the photos) * The individual snapchat-story-like feeds you post to (also nice, love they go away) * The lack of a central feed or RTs or easy way to get viral that can happen in places like twitter. Obviously, I'm not going to be sharing ssh private keys or passwords over it, but for the most part it's secure against the casual online lurker. It's a great mix of the point of snapchat with the power of slack and twitter. I can come up with so many more ways I love the idea, but I can tell I'm already not doing it justice so I'll stop, but I think this is something worth looking at if nothing else as a launching point for someone else. I'm not saying it'll be the next snapchat/facebook/instagram/twitter, and I'm comfortable knowing its more gonna be like Ello and Merkat, but I like the possibilities with it for doing what I always imagined social media could and should be after seeing the exodus of quality content from friends being replaced with fake updates and perfectly posed photos. Anything that inspires spontaneity like this, snapchat, or beme is in my opinion what social media needs to deliver for me to use it and feel comfortable sharing.

bgraves 11y ago

I've been using peach for a few days (@bgraves, add me!) I'm liking it. 1. It's different and disconnected. I have FB/IG for personal/family stuff, LinkedIN/Twitter for biz stuff. Peach is more fun and more 'creative'. 2. The magic words are a gimmick for sure. But it's a _fun_ gimmick. 3. Kinda related to #1 it's a smaller 'community' now and folks are just trying stuff out. Overall I've found my self posting a quick update on Peach over the past 48 hours more than I have on "traditional" social media (can we call Twitter, et al. traditional now?) over the past 2 weeks. Yes, there's a novelty factor. And maybe that's it and it will die on the Vine.

kordless 11y ago

Would be cool to do a Slack command for this that would post stuff to Twitter/other social media sites.

xedarius 11y ago

Peach is pretty neat all in, seems like they've made social 'fun', something that's been lost by the current crop of social media companies. With regards to the command line, it's really clever, it frees up so much UI space, the app appears uncluttered and inviting. If anyone has been near a Bloomberg terminal you'll know this is how Bloomberh has worked for many years, and the users love it.

tmaly 11y ago

I would like to see a geo location based network like in William Gibson's Spook Country

jtn_001 11y ago

It's Yo messaging app but we can do more things using magic words. "magic words" have endless possibilities, Interesting to see in future that, peach keep inventing new magic words their own or allow to other third party for creating own magic words?