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>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 beyon

>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.

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.