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> However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. You need to explain a claim like that. On the fa

> However, Slack has lowered the standards for desktop software by being a really terrible piece of software. You need to explain a claim like that. On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. I'd quite like it to have code syntax highlighting. But really, what are you talking about?

jumbopapa 7y ago
The fact that the performance of the application is awful. You would think that a $16B company could move away from Electron and make native applications for their platforms.
- dthedev 7y ago
  It's never been awful for me. Even when running it on an iPhone 6S, it has always been nice and responsive.
  - danny_taco 7y ago
    It is native on iOS but not for desktop.
bonaldi 7y ago
>On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully". But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than it needs to be. Their quick-switcher is a quasi CLI bandage over this that increases cognitive load on the user. The enterprise multi-slack experience is even more horrible as it expands that problem across multiple quasi-discrete instances. On iOS it does unnatural things with text so you can't select portions to copy and paste. On desktop it is so much of a resource hog it's our generation's version of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping. And this isn't intrinsic: none of this stuff was an issue when you could use IRC clients to access it. But they turned those off.
- Myrmornis 7y ago
  I use Slack every day in the Desktop Electron app and the iOS app. Firstly, lack of accessibility is lack of accessibility. Beauty is a distinct concept. Your comment reminds me of the sign on the Berkeley/Oakland border that reads "Animal rights are human rights". Both are highly desirable, but that does not make them synonymous or coextensive. OK, It's never occurred to me that I wanted a conversation in a different window. You use ⌘-k to switch channels. Partially drafted messages are retained. I think I prefer that to a mess of windows that I'd have to manage though of course I don't mean to impose my preference on you. I have the desktop client open and it's using about 800MB memory between the main process and 3 helper processes. I agree it's a lot, but it seems 100% standard for modern applications. Everything seems to be built around the assumption that people have a $2000 laptop like rich westerners might. So I don't agree with it but I wouldn't single out Slack for criticism beyond any other modern consumer tech company.
  - jdm2212 7y ago
    Just my two cents, but I have to kill and restart the Slack app every morning because if left alone too long it starts eating 100+% of CPU and then becomes unresponsive (while still pegging the CPU). No other vanilla Electron app I've used does that.
  - bonaldi 7y ago
    It wasn't claimed to be "beautiful", it was that it "works beautifully". And if it's not accessible, for a serious amount of people, it doesn't work. At all.
  - wbl 7y ago
    And people still mock my editor choice for being eight megabytes and constantly swapping.
staybythebay 7y ago
Maybe people are generally jaded to to the slowness of cross-platform Javascript apps, but if you take a step back you can really see how bad it is. I had people at my last job who had to quit Slack because of how hot it was making their laptops, and how much memory it was using. At my current job, Slack is definitely one of my most rate limiting applications for how quickly I can get things done. Scrolling in chat, searching, switching channels- these are all actions that are extremely slow, and sometimes seem like they don’t work at all.
- rightbyte 7y ago
  Ye. It's silly how single page text search is now a hard problem to get done right with JS text edit fields. It's the same thing with the Swarm review CI tool. If you diff a big enought file, but still quite small for a conputer, it get slow or crashes. Also the same thing with MS Teams. The prior conversion are not loaded at startup and if you scroll it shows place holders instead of the text for some seconds.
systemBuilder 7y ago
Search doesn't work in slack! Have to use chrome incremental search! Price/sales = 42, bubble stock ...
bborud 7y ago
If you think Slack works beautifully you probably do not care about the things I find offensive about it. Like the slowness of switching contexts or the fact that it can only have one conversation on screen at any given time (which in turn makes the slow switching painful). And this is before we get into the fact that it devours RAM and uses more CPU than is reasonable, making it somewhat pathetic if you think of programming as a craft.

jumbopapa 7y ago

The fact that the performance of the application is awful. You would think that a $16B company could move away from Electron and make native applications for their platforms.

dthedev 7y ago
It's never been awful for me. Even when running it on an iPhone 6S, it has always been nice and responsive.
- danny_taco 7y ago
  It is native on iOS but not for desktop.

bonaldi 7y ago

>On the face of it, the Slack UI works beautifully in Browser, Desktop and iOS clients. It's not accessible. This alone destroys "beautifully". But even beyond that, it's just not a good citizen or experience wherever it is. It's deeply single-paned and hence single-tasked: you can't open a conversation in a tab or separate window. And switching between conversations/threads/groups on any platform is much harder than it needs to be. Their quick-switcher is a quasi CLI bandage over this that increases cognitive load on the user. The enterprise multi-slack experience is even more horrible as it expands that problem across multiple quasi-discrete instances. On iOS it does unnatural things with text so you can't select portions to copy and paste. On desktop it is so much of a resource hog it's our generation's version of Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping. And this isn't intrinsic: none of this stuff was an issue when you could use IRC clients to access it. But they turned those off.

Myrmornis 7y ago
I use Slack every day in the Desktop Electron app and the iOS app. Firstly, lack of accessibility is lack of accessibility. Beauty is a distinct concept. Your comment reminds me of the sign on the Berkeley/Oakland border that reads "Animal rights are human rights". Both are highly desirable, but that does not make them synonymous or coextensive. OK, It's never occurred to me that I wanted a conversation in a different window. You use ⌘-k to switch channels. Partially drafted messages are retained. I think I prefer that to a mess of windows that I'd have to manage though of course I don't mean to impose my preference on you. I have the desktop client open and it's using about 800MB memory between the main process and 3 helper processes. I agree it's a lot, but it seems 100% standard for modern applications. Everything seems to be built around the assumption that people have a $2000 laptop like rich westerners might. So I don't agree with it but I wouldn't single out Slack for criticism beyond any other modern consumer tech company.
- jdm2212 7y ago
  Just my two cents, but I have to kill and restart the Slack app every morning because if left alone too long it starts eating 100+% of CPU and then becomes unresponsive (while still pegging the CPU). No other vanilla Electron app I've used does that.
- bonaldi 7y ago
  It wasn't claimed to be "beautiful", it was that it "works beautifully". And if it's not accessible, for a serious amount of people, it doesn't work. At all.
- wbl 7y ago
  And people still mock my editor choice for being eight megabytes and constantly swapping.

staybythebay 7y ago

Maybe people are generally jaded to to the slowness of cross-platform Javascript apps, but if you take a step back you can really see how bad it is. I had people at my last job who had to quit Slack because of how hot it was making their laptops, and how much memory it was using. At my current job, Slack is definitely one of my most rate limiting applications for how quickly I can get things done. Scrolling in chat, searching, switching channels- these are all actions that are extremely slow, and sometimes seem like they don’t work at all.

rightbyte 7y ago
Ye. It's silly how single page text search is now a hard problem to get done right with JS text edit fields. It's the same thing with the Swarm review CI tool. If you diff a big enought file, but still quite small for a conputer, it get slow or crashes. Also the same thing with MS Teams. The prior conversion are not loaded at startup and if you scroll it shows place holders instead of the text for some seconds.

systemBuilder 7y ago

Search doesn't work in slack! Have to use chrome incremental search! Price/sales = 42, bubble stock ...

bborud 7y ago

If you think Slack works beautifully you probably do not care about the things I find offensive about it. Like the slowness of switching contexts or the fact that it can only have one conversation on screen at any given time (which in turn makes the slow switching painful). And this is before we get into the fact that it devours RAM and uses more CPU than is reasonable, making it somewhat pathetic if you think of programming as a craft.