3 ms·

Right off the bat, this has much better performance on my laptop than Slack; Slack really spins the fans. Also, that extra layer of organization provided by the

Right off the bat, this has much better performance on my laptop than Slack; Slack really spins the fans. Also, that extra layer of organization provided by the thread column was needed badly. I personally was hoping for tags and tag-groups in Slack, but this should also do nicely. We have been using Slack as a UI for our backend services, for example, and it is a great way to present reports and alerts, and offer basic controls to the relevant person. For me, whether or not I actually adopt Twist will depend on how easily I can interact with it from my own software. I would suggest making the integrations page easier to find - I had to troll through the Zendesk archive to find it, even though it is a core feature. Also, a link to the API docs on the help page would be nice. (Edit: Didn't realize until now that integrations are at the channel level, not the top level.) API docs: https://doist.gitbooks.io/twist-api/content/ https://doist.gitbooks.io/twist-api/content/

Diederich 9y ago
Curious: I've always used slack from a web browser rather than their native app. What, if anything, do you personally miss from the web app in slack?
- devrandomguy 9y ago
  Well, the native Slack app is just an Electron wrapper around their web app, as far as I can tell. The performance feels roughly the same for both web and desktop. The main reason I kept the desktop app, is so that I don't need to "download" the app every time my browser's cached copy is invalidated or expires. But being able to start the app with a couple keystrokes from my OS's quick launch menu is also nice.
  - Diederich 9y ago
    Interesting. So you're saying that it really 'spins the fans' when you run slack as a pure web app as well? It seems quite lightweight to me, on latest chrome in Ubuntu on a late 2016 macbook pro.
    - devrandomguy 9y ago
      Just tested again. Performance is good when idling, but while loading content in a heavy channel, scrolling gets laggy and one CPU plateaus for a while. Maybe the app is inserting DOM nodes individually, in a loop? I guess it's too early for me to evaluate the performance of Twist, because I am not on any large teams there. But I can see that Slack at least, has room for improvement in rendering performance. Perhaps there is some general optimization they are missing out on, like immutable state + shouldComponentUpdate. That one saved a flailing app of mine in the past. I'm in Firefox on Linux, i7-4500U, 8GB ram.
- mdeeks 9y ago
  The native app gives you a red badge when there are unread items which I find super useful. I also like that I can cmd+tab to it without having to fish for the right tab in Chrome. Sometimes I completely close Chrome and forget that Slack isn't open anymore and I wont be notified when people are trying to reach me.
ropiku 9y ago
Looked at the Twist mac app and looks all native, using Swift. Unlike Slack which is an Electron webapp.

Diederich 9y ago

Curious: I've always used slack from a web browser rather than their native app. What, if anything, do you personally miss from the web app in slack?

devrandomguy 9y ago
Well, the native Slack app is just an Electron wrapper around their web app, as far as I can tell. The performance feels roughly the same for both web and desktop. The main reason I kept the desktop app, is so that I don't need to "download" the app every time my browser's cached copy is invalidated or expires. But being able to start the app with a couple keystrokes from my OS's quick launch menu is also nice.
- Diederich 9y ago
  Interesting. So you're saying that it really 'spins the fans' when you run slack as a pure web app as well? It seems quite lightweight to me, on latest chrome in Ubuntu on a late 2016 macbook pro.
  - devrandomguy 9y ago
    Just tested again. Performance is good when idling, but while loading content in a heavy channel, scrolling gets laggy and one CPU plateaus for a while. Maybe the app is inserting DOM nodes individually, in a loop? I guess it's too early for me to evaluate the performance of Twist, because I am not on any large teams there. But I can see that Slack at least, has room for improvement in rendering performance. Perhaps there is some general optimization they are missing out on, like immutable state + shouldComponentUpdate. That one saved a flailing app of mine in the past. I'm in Firefox on Linux, i7-4500U, 8GB ram.
mdeeks 9y ago
The native app gives you a red badge when there are unread items which I find super useful. I also like that I can cmd+tab to it without having to fish for the right tab in Chrome. Sometimes I completely close Chrome and forget that Slack isn't open anymore and I wont be notified when people are trying to reach me.

ropiku 9y ago

Looked at the Twist mac app and looks all native, using Swift. Unlike Slack which is an Electron webapp.